White Bird in a Blizzard

White Bird in a Blizzard by Laura Kasischke

for Bill

I WOULD LIKE TO THANK BILL ABERNETHY, LISA BANKOFF, JENNIFER BARTH, AND ANTONYA NELSON FOR HELPING ME WRITE AND REWRITE THIS NOVEL; ED AND JUNE KASISCHKE FOR MANY YEARS OF ENCOURAGEMENT; AND LUCY AND JACK ABERNETHY, MY CHILDREN, FOR LOVE.

ONE

January 1986

I AM SIXTEEN WHEN MY MOTHER STEPS OUT OF HER SKIN ONE frozen January afternoon—pure self, atoms twinkling like microscopic diamond chips around her, perhaps the chiming of a clock, or a few bright flute notes in the distance—and disappears.

No one sees her leave, but she is gone.

Only the morning before, my mother was a housewife—a housewife who, for twenty years, kept our house as swept up and sterile as the mind of winter itself, so perhaps she finally just whisk-broomed herself out, a luminous cloud of her drifting through the bedroom window as soft as talcum powder, mingling with the snowflakes as they fell, and the stardust and the lunar ash out there.

Her name is Eve, and this is Garden Heights, Ohio, so I used to like to think of my mother as Eve—the naked one, the first one—when she was in the Garden, poisoning the weeds with bleach, defoliating the trees, stuffing their leaves down the garbage disposal, then scouring the sink with something chemical and harsh, but powdered, something dyed ocean blue to disguise its deadly powers for the housewives like my mother who bought it, only dimly realizing that what they’d purchased with its snappy name (Spic and Span, Mr. Clean, Fantastik) was pure acid.

The blue of a child’s eyes, the blue of a robin’s egg—

But swallow a teaspoon of that and it will turn your intestines to lace.

This Eve, like the first one, was bored in Garden Heights. She spent her afternoons in the silence of a house she’d just cleaned yesterday from bottom to top, and there was nothing left for her to do beyond planning the nothing of the future, too.

Sometimes, when I came home from school early, I’d find her asleep in my bed. She’d be dressed as if she had somewhere to go—black slacks, a lamb’s-wool sweater, pearls, dark hair set in smooth curls—folded onto her side, not a single light on in the whole house. But that afternoon, something else happened.

What, I can only imagine.

I imagine her standing at the bedroom window watching the sky toss its cold litter of snow on the lawn, thinking about loss, or love, or lust, bored again, then exploding like a bomb of feather-duster feathers, or melting into the wall to wall—a milky, evaporating shadow on the shag.

When my father gets home from work, she is gone completely. When I get home from school, he is sitting in the living room with his suit still on, hands turned up empty on his lap.

We wait all night for her to come home, but she doesn’t.

We don’t eat dinner. We don’t know how.

My sheets feel frozen when I get in bed, and I can hear my father snoring in their bedroom.

I realize now that I knew nothing about my mother except that one day she was here—making dinner, cleaning the house, scowling around with that feather duster—and the next day she wasn’t.

BUT WHAT COULD I HAVE DONE ABOUT MY MOTHER? WHILE she was metamorphosing right in our own home—changing, reshaping, going crazy, or sane—I was becoming sixteen. I thought her trouble was just menopause, or boredom, and by the time I might have said or done something, I was sixteen, my blood like a little creek flooded suddenly with hormones, a babbling brook that had become hot, and high, and dangerous.

I fell in love with the boy next door, and my own flesh became a thing I’d never really worn before. Sometimes, pressing my palms together, I thought I felt a magnetic field between them—something invisible but shaped, like sound, or heat, an egg of light—and it was as though I could hold the life force itself in my hands.

Whatever my mother was up to, I didn’t care.

Phil, the boy next door, is tall, and blond, and actively stupid. “Fuckin’ A,” he’ll say when a bit of poetry is quoted by the TV news anchor. “Straight C’s!” he smiles, waving his report card at me in the cafeteria at school.

In the summer, he wanted me to wear nothing but halter tops, and when we met in our backyards, which were separated only by a yellow ditch of daffodils, he’d come up behind me and slip his hands into the top.

The fertilized lawns throbbed like green glass in the sun.

“Show me,” I would say to Phil as he drove us to school in his father’s sedan, and he’d unzip his pants, take his penis out, flop it around.

Phil has been my boyfriend for a year, and in that year we have talked about almost nothing. If he has any original ideas, any personal opinions wafting around like feathers in his head, he manages to keep them mostly to himself. He listens to WKLL, the heaviest of the heavy-metal stations around here, but he’s not the heavy-metal type. He’s never been to a concert, and can’t remember the names of the bands he likes or tell you what his favorite song of the month is called, let alone what it’s about, all that car-crash clutter behind the singing.

He’s what you’d call a clean-cut kid if you were the type of person who believed in clean-cut kids. No ripped T-shirts. No tattoos. No steel-tipped boots. As suburban as it gets.

But it’s always in the background as he’s driving, and he nods his head as if he’s listening (“W-KILL!” the disc jockeys scream between songs, sounding juvenile and halfhearted and nonviolent), as if he’s enjoying what he hears, as if it speaks to some part of him that is not the least bit visible to the naked eye, some slam-dancing protozoan part.

I’ve learned to tune it out, myself, having always worried that if I listened, really listened, to that kind of music, it might fry some delicate tissue in my inner ear and I’d go deaf.

Phil doesn’t talk much, but it doesn’t matter. If I’d wanted to talk, I could have talked to my mother. For a long time, she was trying to get me to talk—

“Kat,” she said, “do you love this boy?”

“Mom,” I said, turning on her. “What business is that of yours?”

She was standing behind me in the bathroom, looking over my shoulder at the two of us reflected in the mirror above the sink. Just out of the shower, I had a towel wrapped around me, and a veil of steam came between us and smudged our reflections. The humidity smoothed the lines out on her face, and she looked like a foggy me.

“Well, I can’t stand your father,” she said then, and the bluntness of it was like a rubber bat slugging into a rubber ball.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Tell it to someone else,” and pushed past her into the hall.

As simply as my mother was here, and then she wasn’t, Phil and I were virgins, and then we weren’t.

One afternoon when we had no school—my father was at work, my mother was still at the mall—we got into my bed, which was decorated with pansies and piled with stuffed animals that I knocked in one smooth gesture to the floor while Phil stood behind me, thumbs hooked into belt loops, waiting.

Phil is lanky, and when he stands in one place he rests all his weight on one leg, and this turns his body into nothing but angles and planes, a boy made of scrap metal.

It was March, and the light that bled in under the window shades was blurred and pale, as if March had gray water in her veins.

We undid each other’s buttons and zippers under the covers. Neither of us said a word. We stomped our clothes down to the bottom of the bed in a panic of embarrassment and desire, a kind of prone peasant dancing—trampling the grapes, mashing the potatoes. I rolled onto my back, and wondered what I would know next that I’d never known before. Sin? Ecstasy? My own mortality? A glimpse of the cosmos as he entered me?

But when Phil rolled on top of me, what I had was a sudden knowledge of skin.

How much of it there is.

How, like an elastic sock, it’s slipped over all the mystery and liquid that make us live. I could feel Phil’s heart thumping in it, bobbing like a plastic boat in a warm and salty bath, and I could hear that ocean, too, sloshing between his lungs. When he started going faster, getting ready to come, rocking the bed, turning red, he pushed my thighs farther apart with his arms, grimaced horrifically, and the two of us sounded like wet rags being furiously slapped together—

If it hadn’t been for skin, we would have spilled.

So, this was what was on my mind that spring and summer and fall into the bitter beginning of this winter—taking up all my time, occupying all my thoughts—as my mother was preparing herself to vanish, buying miniskirts and birds, talking to herself in the kitchen, hissing at me as I passed her in the hall, making confessions I didn’t want to hear. Just as my mother’s body was turning to glass, cracking all along the spine. Just as my mother was about to become nothing but invisible particles of brightness and air, I was becoming nothing but my body.

Even in the middle of U.S. History, I could smell myself—blood and semen and spit and sweat—between my legs. I’d see him turn a corner in the hallway of our high school, and I would nearly groan with it, imagining the arc of him—hairless and hard, and all that skin—over me in my bed. I’d close my eyes in Psychology and picture my own legs spread, seeing myself from the sky, my nipples pointed up at me, and that teary pinkness waiting for Phil, or God, or something to fill it up.

Desiring him had made me suddenly desire everything. Some nights I’d dream I was lying on a table in a restaurant—maybe Bob’s Chop House—naked, a sprig of parsley near my feet, maybe even an apple in my mouth, and every boy at my high school, maybe even the men—the principal, the janitors, all of them—were lined up, all of them with hard-ons, looking at me hungrily, with Phil at the end of the line, the longest and hardest and hungriest of them all.

This was a whole new planet I suddenly found myself living on, wading every day through a sexual river on fire, and the last thing on my mind was my mother—who was slipping out of the physical world just as I slipped in.

THE FIRST NIGHT MY MOTHER’S GONE I DREAM MY SHEETS have turned to snow, and their cold white wraps me in winter like a stillborn baby. The light, the bed, the sheets—it’s as if a pale angel, enormous, is kneeling over me, a colossus of pure marble, as if she is pressing me with her bare-fingered wings back into the womb of January in Ohio—

I am the small o slipping into the other O, the large empty O that swallows everything whole.

Maybe it would be sweet there, but I’m not ready to go.

The walls begin to throb—electric, frozen. They are frost-furred, and contracting. I realize that if I can’t swim to the surface, these walls will embrace me to death—inevitably, but with affection. I struggle for a long time against them.

When I wake up, my father’s sitting at the edge of my bed.

“That was your mother who called,” he says, though I haven’t heard the phone ring. “She said she’s never coming back.”

I raise myself up on my elbows, “What?”

I ask it without expression.

He doesn’t answer.

He hides his face in his hands. “Oh, Kat,” he sobs, “what are we going to do?”

SHE NAMED ME KATRINA BECAUSE SHE WANTED TO CALL ME Kat. She wanted to call me Kat because I was to be her pet. “Here, Kat. Here, kitty kitty kitty,” she’d call, and I’d come. Sometimes she’d even pat my head, scratch behind my ears.

Katrina. A kind of fancy cat. A Russian breed, perhaps. The kind of cat that decorates the couch just by sleeping on it.

So, for a while I thought I was my mother’s pet, and nothing but. When I got old enough to get the joke, I’d even purr for her, crawl to wherever she was sitting and rub against her legs.

But when I got even older, I’d glare at her in silence when she called me, and stand my ground. She’d hiss through her teeth, swat in my direction with her claws, and laugh. After a while, I couldn’t stand her. The sound of her crossing the living room in slippers made my head ache. And after I fell in love with Phil, just as I wanted less of her, she wanted more and more of me. I would sit across the kitchen table from her in the morning while she drank coffee and stared at me, and I thought, If I look up, this woman will swallow me whole.

But I was her pet for a long time, despite how quickly the time went by. I remember the sound of her voice, naming everything, when I still knew the names for nothing. Woof, she said, pointing at the neighbor’s dog scratching in our garden. It was big and blond, fur like polished straw, and wore a collar with tags that made silvery music under our kitchen window. It dug and dug. “Let it,” my mother said, even though it was ruining her petunias. “Let it figure out for itself there’s nothing there.”

Snake, she said as she held me up to the terrarium at the back of the pet store where the air smelled of piss and vinegar and wood chips. The snake was asleep, coiled and breathing, like my father’s garden hose in the garage. I remember there were smudged fingerprints on the glass—round, human designs, perfectly reproduced, lines spiraling into tiny, receding eyes—as if someone had wanted to leave some evidence behind.

Bird, she said as we were walking out of the pet store and one smashed itself against the bars of its cage in our direction—a pretty fist, white and screeching, something an old lady might wear on her hat to church on Sunday.

And I remember lying beside her in my parents’ bed one morning after my father had gone to work.

Frost had scribbled the windows, but I couldn’t read what it said. I couldn’t read at all yet. Whenever my mother opened a book, I had to trust that the story she told me was the one that was written there. And later, of course, when I could read, I’d find out that, more often than not, it wasn’t.

My mother had a sense of humor.

For instance, at the end of “Rumpelstiltskin,” the queen does not have to give her baby up to the manic, miniature man who demands it. The reason she’s wearing that beatific cookie-cutter smile is because she’s tricked him, learned his name, and gets to keep her firstborn, not because she’s just given the baby away.

She has black hair.

We are laughing.

It is a nest of feathered pillows here, both of us in white gowns. Silly, she pulls the bedsheet over our heads, and with the morning light streaming in, the sheet is a whole heaven above us, blinding me with brightness, and for a moment I’ve lost her in it. “Mama” I call, and the syllables rise from my mouth like small and cold balloons.

“Kat,” she says, “here’s Mama,” from somewhere beside me inside the nothing.

“Mama’s here,” she says, but I am lost in all that white, and have no idea where here is.

“WHERE COULD SHE HAVE GONE?” I ASK MY FATHER OVER dinner. I’ve broiled a piece of beef I bought this morning at the grocery store, a place I don’t remember having been since I was small enough to ride in the cart, and I’ve sliced it in half between us. He microwaved two potatoes, which hissed as they cooked. Together we’ve shredded some lettuce into a bowl and tossed black olives into it.

It’s the first real meal we’ve ever eaten at the dining room table without her, and it tastes good.

This afternoon, Detective Scieziesciez—whose name is pronounced, despite its hardness, despite the consonants hidden like barbs and thistles in it, simply, shh-shh-shh—called again, as he has every afternoon since we reported her missing, to ask if anything has turned up, changed, or suddenly occurred to us. Any more phone calls from her? Any postcards? Any lawyers serving papers?

But my father just shook his head sadly on the other end of the line, as if the detective could see him from the downtown Toledo office he works out of.

“Nothing,” my father said over and over, “nothing. Nothing.”

Then, hanging up, my father said, “Thank you, Detective Shh-shh-shh,” to the air, staring into it for a while like a man consumed with despair, a man wandering, lost, through a tunnel of despair wearing a gray prison uniform in his gray imagination.

My father shakes his head sadly now, as he did then, and grimaces at me across the table, a bloody thread of meat snagged in his front teeth. There is a familiar, watery-eyed expression on his face. He shrugs and looks down at his damaged dinner, torn to pieces on a plate.

“Your mother never loved me,” he says before he picks up his fork and stabs into it again.

THEY WERE AN ATTRACTIVE SUBURBAN COUPLE. BEFORE SHE vanished, you might have seen them on a Wednesday night at Bob’s Chop House. As the hostess led you to your table, you passed theirs, shushing past their silence, glancing at their salads.

Both of them had dark hair only faintly tipped with gray. Hers was shoulder length and smooth. His was whatever length and style was fashionable then for men. Not too long in back, not too tall on top. Conservative, but in touch with the times. Perhaps he was wearing the dark slacks he’d worn to work that day—half a suit: He’d have left the jacket at home.

My father’s features were sharp—a sculpted nose and deep-set eyes. My mother’s cheekbones were high, and she was as slender as a girl. Flat stomach, narrow hips. Her face was always made up with a careful hand—the right tint of blush, maroon lipstick, brown eyeliner, and a beige base. The girls behind those makeup counters in the department stores she frequented knew her name, her favorite shades. Bisque, Berry, Chocolate Mousse—as if you could make a woman’s face into an elegant dessert eaten off a delicate plate. Good French perfume, too, eau-de-vie—you could smell it on her if you got close.

They were well-spoken. They seemed sincere.

Still, when you saw her seated across from him at Bob’s Chop House, both of them sipping rocky drinks, linen napkins on their laps, shiny silverware between them, she might look up at you as you passed by—her blue eyes flashing—and what you’d sense, if you sensed anything at all, was cold.

In truth, my mother disappeared twenty years before she did. She moved to the suburbs with a husband. She had a child. She grew a little older every day—the way a middle-aged wife and mother becomes ever more elusive to the naked eye. You look up from your magazine in the dentist’s office when she walks in, but you see right through her.

And the younger woman she once was, the one you might have noticed—she became no more than a ghost, a phantom girl, wandering away in a snowstorm one day.

Or she became me.

Maybe I stepped into the skin my mother left behind, and became the girl my mother had been, the one she still wanted to be. Maybe I was wearing her youth now like an airy scarf, an accessory, all bright nerves and sticky pearls, and maybe that’s why she spent so much time staring at me with that wistful look in her eyes.

I was wearing something of hers, something she wanted back. It was written all over her face. After I turned sixteen, I couldn’t bear to look at that face as it gazed into mine.

“Kat,” she said one early Saturday evening in September, standing behind me at the mirror in the hallway upstairs, “you look like I looked when I was you.”

I was wearing a tight black dress. Phil was taking me to homecoming. I was pinning my hair up over my neck, then letting it fall again. I had been thinking about him, how he might pull the pins out one by one in the backseat of his father’s sedan and bite my neck, unzip this black dress and slip it down over my breasts. I hated talking to my mother at all, but the worst was having to talk to her when I was thinking about sex—the sexual thought suspended, half exposed in the expression and smell of it on me. It seemed, those days, that my mother was always creeping up behind me just as I was leaning into an imaginary nakedness with him, as if she’d crept up after some wet trail I’d left. When there was long, moist kissing on the television, I had to leave the room. She was always looking too hard at that kiss.

“What?” I asked.

“I mean,” she said, “you look like I looked when I was your age,” and she wandered away, seeming dazed, as if Time had just snuck up behind her and knocked her on the head with a very hard pillow.

In December, she’d turned forty-six. There were a few gray strands where she parted her dark hair, and she plucked those out with tweezers at the bathroom mirror in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep. But she was still girlishly thin—still the same weight she’d carried down the aisle beside my father twenty years before.

There is a picture on their bedroom wall of them marrying each other. In it, my father looks sheepish and stiff.

But my mother already looks frantic, full of hate, wearing all that lightness—something white and exotic caught in an invisible net. That weight, or the absence of it, is draped in lace, and she drags a train of satin as long as winter, or the future, behind her.

And there is another photograph of her that has enjoyed a fleeting fame since she disappeared. Tacked to the bulletin board outside the supermarket, taped to the pharmacy’s plate-glass window, MISSING above the picture, HAVE YOU SEEN ME?:

Suburban housewife.

Mid-forties.

A whisper of frost wound through her dark hair.

My father took that photograph himself, the one on the flyers, the one they used on the local six o’clock news. It was Christmas Day, two weeks before she vanished. She’d just opened a gift he’d given her. She peered at it under the tissue paper, as thin as pared skin, and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll take it back.”

“Jesus Christ, Evie. What do you want?” he asked, the camera she’d just given him dangling around his neck.

“Surely not this,” she said. And he snapped her bitter smile.

Had they ever had any fun? Had they ever, as Phil and I did, groped each other in the dark, gotten lost swimming in each other’s bodies, that long kissing that turns your muscles to spilled milk, that numbness after hours of fucking, that blindness of eyes all over your body when the lights are out?

Whenever I tried to imagine it, I failed.

One early evening a few weeks before, when she and my father were out—perhaps at Bob’s Chop House—I went into their bedroom and stood looking at their bed for a long time. It was, of course, inconceivable that they slept together. Or, I mean, had sex. Their sleep was easy enough to imagine. My father like a snoring corpse beside her, his deodorized sweat sowing salt into their sheets. My mother’s tight lips parted loosely for a while, stardust gathering in the corners of her eyes before she bolted upright when the birds outside began to sing.

She was nervous, a light night sleeper who treated sleep as if it were an expensive dress that required many preparations to wear: glass of water on her nightstand, a room both warm and cool, a light on somewhere, but not on her—though, as I’ve said, all those afternoons right before she disappeared, there she’d be when I got home from school, folded up on her side, lost in the kind of sleep that swoops down on the sleeper in one big storm of wings and a funnel of feathers, hauling her off in its beak.

I knew what their sleeping beside one another for twenty years was like, but when I tried to imagine the two of them doing what Phil and I did, I saw naked statues in an art museum instead, a guard in an olive uniform standing in an archway warning you not to touch.

Their bedroom was as plain and orderly as a hotel room. A white spread, white curtains, oak chest of drawers. They had two closets, his and hers. Hers smelled like lavender soap. His smelled like leather.

I got down on my hands and knees on their gray carpet and looked under the bed. Nothing there. I opened the top drawer of the chest. Socks, a shallow dish of cuff links, a handkerchief with BC, my father’s initials, on it.

What had I wanted to find?

Some sign of their secret life.

A condom wrapper? A dirty magazine?

I knew where my father kept those—the dirty magazines, I mean: in a file cabinet in the unfinished part of our basement beside the horizontal freezer full of yellow chicken limbs and slabs of steak gone pale with cold—a chest full of frozen hearts—and his tool bench, with his bright and expensive tools, which had the dustless look of things not used.

He kept that file cabinet locked, but I knew how to open it. Right next to the cabinet, tacked to a piece of corkboard over his tool bench, was a file card with the combination: 36–24–35.

It was like a joke—both the combination and where he kept it, precisely where anyone wanting to open the cabinet would look to find the combination for the lock—and I’d spin those ideal measurements and look at his spread-eagled Bunnies and Pets whenever I wanted.

Sometimes, my friends Mickey and Beth and I looked at them together, slipping an issue out of my father’s file cabinet there in the basement, the place we retreated to whenever Mickey and Beth came over.

Down there, my parents wouldn’t bother us—only, occasionally, come to the top of the stairs to shout something about dinner, or to announce that Beth’s mother had called for her to come home. We could do whatever we wanted in those two rooms—the finished one, which had a gray carpet remnant covering the floor, an orange vinyl couch, a pool table no one ever used, and the unfinished one with its cement floor and white appliances humming in the emptiness. We could smoke. We could drink rum in our diet Cokes. We could look at those magazines, my father’s secret Pets.

“Gross,” we’d say, or, “Oh my God.” But we would hold the glossy pages open for a long time, looking down at whoever she was that month—all those limbs, those wet lips. She’d look like something a wolf would eat, spread out like that, all that edible flesh, or something a hunter had shot out of the sky. When she landed at his feet, he’d jumped back in surprise with no idea what to do next.

But those magazines had nothing to do with my parents’ secret life. That was my father’s hobby, and I didn’t want to think about it. Obviously, he thought no one knew what he had down there, hidden, locked up naked in the basement, waiting for him to sneak down in the middle of the night and take a peek. But in its secretness, it made him even duller, even safer, even less sexual than he already seemed.

Still, if I’d found one, found Variations, or Big Boobs, in their dresser, a place they shared, that would have been something else. That would have meant that she knew, and approved, or that they looked at them together.

Of course, there was nothing there.

I fished through the second drawer. Women’s underwear. Nothing black. Nothing dirty. I looked in the third drawer, which was full of blouses she never wore. Too frilly, or too sheer, or too plain, but too expensive to throw away, and in the back, a shoe box, which I opened, and inside it a paperback book with a pink cover and raised white letters, Achieving Orgasm: A Woman’s Guide.

I thought, Jesus Christ.

I pictured her scrubbing the toilet, disinfecting.

I pictured her in the kitchen, baking angry batches of cookies.

I saw her in the basement, wringing the necks of my father’s white shirts while a choir of nasty children sang “Ring around the collar! Ring around the collar!” in her head.

I saw her in the living room running the vacuum cleaner over and over a four-inch area of carpet, seeing something in there that the huge rattling suction of her machine could not suck up, and pictured her in a bookstore in the mall on a Friday afternoon, circling a rack of books for a long time before she got up the nerve to buy that one and take it to the register.

She would have carried herself with a kind of stubborn dignity, buying that book. As the young clerk slipped it into a paper bag and handed her some change, she’d have looked him straight in the eyes and seen herself in there, wearing a camel’s-hair coat, a black skirt, a silk blouse with bone buttons.

To that young clerk she must have looked like a woman with enough money to be happy (clearly, she paid another woman to manicure her nails, set her hair in smooth curls) staring at her own reflection in his eyes as he slipped this bit of bitter information about her into a paper bag—as if she’d just bought and paid for a rotten part of her own body, a limb that had been frostbitten and was putrid now, a limb the clerk was selling to her in public, in the weak light of the mall.

Pathetic, and absurd, he must have thought as he handed the book to her.

“Have a nice day,” he said.

I put the lid back on the shoe box and closed the drawer.

Their marriage, I knew then, as I must have always known—their marriage was like a long drink of water so icy it turns the teeth to diamonds in your mouth.

A drink of water from a frozen fountain, twenty years long.

My MOTHER MOVED TO THE SUBURBS WITH A HUSBAND, AND she vanished in Garden Heights. Her name was Eve, and although my father’s name was Brock, not Adam, they were one of Garden Heights’s first couples.

Garden Heights was an Eden without a past, like the first one—but also without temptation, or snakes, or trees. Our house was built in the middle of a cornfield in a subdivision a few miles from Toledo, and no one had ever lived in it before us, as if God had decided to re-create the world without variety this time.

Newness was the whole idea behind Garden Heights. Newness and sameness. Every house in the cornfield had been built with the same blueprint, and there was even a bylaw that prohibited the building of fences and additions. The point to the place was fitting in, and my father did.

This was a life he liked. Every night, he came home happy. “Evie!” he might say to my mother, “Guess what? I bought a raffle ticket for the board of education benefit, and won a crockpot. Look.”

It was brown with a long, winding cord. For years my mother kept it above the refrigerator. Only once, she let a piece of pot roast shrivel up to shoe leather in it, and after that, she threw it out.

Or, he’d bring home the civic section of the Monday paper, and he’d show my mother his name in it: “Brock W. Connors is to be honored by the Executive Men’s Charitable Foundation for work benefiting the Lion’s Club of northeastern Ohio.”

For weeks, he’d collected pairs of old eyeglasses, gone knock-knocking all over the neighborhood like a child’s corny joke, kept them in cardboard boxes in our coat closet. When I asked him what they were for, he said they were for the poor. When I asked him what good other people’s—rich people’s—glasses were to the poor, he looked at me blankly, then narrowed his eyes, as if I were either very obstinate or very blurred.

In Garden Heights, my father thrived like a rubber plant left in a sunny spot and watered a lot, but my mother didn’t. She was a different kind of plant entirely. A plant that could have borne thistles and juicy, dangerous fruit.

Instead, she planted petunias in our yard, and by July of every year they were dried out. Like complaints, or exasperation. Our house was stuck into some of the world’s most fertile earth—black and loamy and damp—and anything could have grown there. A handful of it was as heavy as a heart, or guilt. As a child, I used to dig it up with a plastic shovel and pretend to bake cakes and cookies, shapeless pastries patted out of gravity.

That dough, that dirt, was as dark as space. For thousands of years, our backyard had been ice, and when the Ice Age ended it thawed into a swampy dinosaur forest, and when the dinosaurs got zapped by whatever zapped the dinosaurs, farmers came and turned it into farmland and country meadows, which were later bulldozed to make way for subdivisions with names like Country Meadows Estates.

Still, they’d find the skeleton of a woolly mammoth in there every once in a while as they were pouring concrete for a strip mall close by—something giant and shaggy that had gotten sucked into the ancient muck—and the sweat and blood and milk of those farmers before us could still be smelled in our backyard. The smell of yeasty manure just under the golf-course smell of lawn.

Anything could have grown there, but my mother grew petunias. I never knew what she wanted, but I knew it wasn’t in Garden Heights, and it wasn’t my father.

She was attractive. She walked gracefully in her high heels—but quickly, without hesitation, like a woman with a crystal dish of butter on her head. Men looked at her when we went into restaurants, staring at her ankles as we waited for the hostess, and my mother would pretend not to notice. But she noticed.

Once I saw a truck of sheep U-turn on our street. It must have been lost on a detour off the highway. I could see them from our front yard in the back of that truck—maybe fifteen sheep peeking out at me between the steel slats of that truck’s trailer.

To keep from falling over as it turned too fast, those sheep had to dance. It was so pathetic, it wasn’t even sad. There they were, being driven to their deaths, trying not to stumble, not to bump into each other, dancing a graceful, desperate dance of politeness.

That was how my mother looked when men looked at her.

She was getting older, but she was still attractive. When they looked at her, she noticed. And so did my father. He would glare down at his own shoes with their shiny noses.

Maybe he knew, too, that my mother wanted something.

How could he not know?

Those men looking at her ankles in Bob’s Chop House, they knew.

And every afternoon and evening of those last months before she left, there she’d be, folded in half on their bed or mine, asleep like death, waking finally to the sound of canned laughter after my father got home, rising to the surface of her life like a sick aquarium fish.

When my father turned the television off, there would be nothing but the sound of flat and endless heaven above and beyond our house. Wind in a parking ramp. An empty tin can held up to an ear. It must have been unbearable. If I was off somewhere with Phil, there wouldn’t even be the sound of the radio playing in my bedroom.

And then my father would climb the stairs. Loose change in his pockets—silvery, a tin bucket of forks and knives, as if a janitor were jangling his cold ring of keys toward the bedroom as winter dusk descended, earlier and earlier every night—

A man with a handful of dull bells, getting closer.

“What’s for dinner, Evie?” he’d ask, and she’d roll over to look at him through her hair. His face would be lit from above. He’d switched the ceiling light on, and it blacked out his eyes and cast shadows from his sharp features down his face, as if it were cracked.

“What?” she asked, pushing her hair out of the way so he could better see her annoyed expression.

“What’s for dinner? It’s six o’clock.” He was wearing a flannel, afterwork shirt, but he’d still have on his dress pants and his shiny black shoes, as if relaxation were something you only needed to do from the waist up.

These two decades, my father had also stayed slim. His face had aged well. He looked younger than fifty, staring down at her, but also as preserved and eternal as some frozen-faced saint painted on the wall of a chapel during the darkest Dark Age days. Pale. Uninquisitive. A painted saint gazing without judgment, or interest, at centuries of women passing by, bearing candles, or babies, or flowers in their black habits, lace veils, go-go boots, and girdles.

My father was the kind of man, like one of those expressionless saints, who sees a woman—naked, or roped in pearls, tied to a stake, or shedding tears of blood—and thinks, I wonder what’s for dinner.

“Go away,” my mother said. “I’ll make dinner in a minute.”

If he realized then that she hated him, he pretended not to notice.

Without another word, he left.

My mother could hear him in the den, changing channels on the television with the remote control again.

She rolled to her side and swung her feet off the bed, and perhaps the numbness of them surprised her on the bedroom rug. There was a mossy taste, lush and sun warmed, on her tongue—as if, in her dream, she’d eaten a butterfly.

Briefly, she might have thought of arsenic, though she didn’t even know what it was, exactly, or where one bought it. But she might have imagined my father at the dinner table, hunched over his stew, turning blue, looking up at her with a pleased smile, muttering, “This is good,” before he died.

It was just a thought.

Wives all over Ohio probably had them.

But the idea of murder was no more serious than the kinds of fantasies in which a suburban housewife imagines herself slapping a bad waitress, or punching a meddlesome librarian in the stomach: She is polite, she’d never do it. Instead, she might wad up a piece of gum and stick it under a chair, hoping the librarian would find it there years later and have to scrape it off with a knife.

Still, there was desire, there was poison in the air. Every night, my mother read the obituaries in silence, and I imagine she was comparing the ages of the deceased to my father’s. A lot of men die in their fifties, leaving behind a great many grieving wives.

But my father was so robust, it must have been hard to imagine. He did not seem at all like the kind of man who might die “unexpectedly, at home” or “after a long battle with colon cancer.” It might take gallons of arsenic to kill him, or years and years spent watching him across the dining room table, wrestling with his colon as it decayed.

One night, only a few weeks before she disappeared, my mother went down to the basement freezer to find something to feed him, her stockinged feet cold on the cement floor.

That night, the freezer light did not come on when she opened it—burnt out, she thought—but there were the usual two good steaks. A cutup chicken—twisted, yellow limbed, a little human. A pound of ground sirloin on a square of Styrofoam.

She took that out, brought it upstairs to the kitchen, and put it in the microwave for five minutes while she tossed some salad into bowls and filled a pot with water to boil pasta. She was wearing pearls, and a neat brown skirt, a soft beige turtleneck—perhaps she’d gone to the bank that afternoon to deposit my father’s check—all a little rumpled from hours of sleeping in them.

The linoleum under her panty-hosed feet felt warped, blistering up along the seams, as if something humpbacked were pushing itself up from the basement. She needed to call Herschel’s Furniture & Floor, and made a mental note.

When the microwave began its steady beeping, she took the pound of ground sirloin—defrosted now, heavier with its hot blood—and peeled away the plastic, tossed it into a pan, turned the gas on under it. And right away, she knew something was wrong.

Desire. Poison.

At first there was just the smell of toffee—too sweet, like a body washed up bloated on a beach. Blood and grease spat and sizzled beneath the shredded beef, but the smell grew stronger, and the kitchen filled up fast with the stench of old death, and something else—something fetid, stuffed with honeysuckle, as if a whole flock of cupids had drowned in a perfumed bath.

My mother felt dizzy with it. She had to lean against the refrigerator, and she could feel it purr against her hair.

“Jesus,” my father said, hurrying in, “what stinks?” He turned the gas off under the frying pan. “This meat is rotten.” He held the pan up by the black handle, then turned his face to her—curious.

“Throw it away,” she said. “We have to go out to eat.”

He tossed the bad hamburger, pan and all, into the garbage can under the sink, then went down to the basement and, a few minutes later called up, “Jesus, Evie, this freezer’s unplugged. The whole thing’s full of rotten meat.”

Of course: The light had not come on.

Two days before, she remembered, she’d had to crawl on hands and knees behind the freezer to find a mother-of-pearl button that had popped off one of my sweaters when she pulled it from the dryer, and she must have accidentally knocked the plug from the socket.

“Plug it back in,” she yelled.

I came home just as my father emerged from the basement.

“My God,” I said, coming into the kitchen. “What reeks?”

“Shut up,” my mother said, hurrying past me. “We’re going out to eat.”

That night, we did go out to eat. Perhaps we had Chinese. Or we each ate a steak at Bob’s Chop House. Maybe we had a pizza at Mariani’s. I sat between them at the table, thinking about Phil, sloshing the ice around and around in my water glass until my mother said, “Stop that.”

Wherever we were, we’d eat in silence. Just a word now and then about the service, about the noisy children of the other patrons. My father might have asked me how school was going, then nodded his head while I answered in a low, bored voice.

As a family, we were vague. My mother was always in the center of her own agitation, seeming as though, far away, part of her was being chased along a dirt road by a swarm of bees. My father, on the other hand, was right there, right on the surface of the world, taking it all in too easily—the salad, the beef, the silverware—but there was nothing more to it, nothing in his world you couldn’t see. And I was sixteen, trying desperately to slip into the privacy of my own mind, a place where their questions and faces could not interfere with my thoughts about sex, a place where they couldn’t find me in some fantasy of naked flesh.

“What are you thinking about?” my father would ask me cheerfully as I sat there between them sawing my steak in half. “You sure seem lost in thought.”

I’d imagine telling him. The sound of his utensils dropping from his hands.

But, perhaps I should have known then, I should have known that night, standing in the kitchen, that foul meat in the air—looking back on it now, I see that it was the end and the beginning of something more than dinner. More than ruined appetite, a postponed meal, a marriage strained, a freezer unplugged.

I could smell the death between them.

When my father came up from the basement, he had a look of puzzlement and blame on his face, his surprise at finding something wretched in the kitchen, cooking—something cloying and corrupted, which his wife had planned for supper.

And my mother’s delicate suffering, the elegant clothes, rumpled. In a few weeks, she’d be that woman with MISSING written above her picture.

But that night, she was just the suburban wife of someone who’d wanted a simple dinner of macaroni and grease. And she’d cooked him something ghastly and mortal instead.

“What’s that smell?” Phil asked when he came over to see me later that night.

“Something’s dead,” I said.

Phil smirked, I remember. “Is it your dad?” he asked.

AND I KNEW WHY HE ASKED IT. IN MANY WAYS, MY FATHER was dead. When I was only ten or eleven years old, I used to ask my father, as a joke, what the world had been like when he was alive—was there television, for instance, were there cars? Of course, I meant, when he was a child, and my father got the joke, and always laughed, but there was a bite to the joke, and I stopped making it after a while.

My father was, as I’ve said, healthy. A good-looking man. But the kind of dullness he wore like a badge—(“I’m a simple man,” he would say to my mother when she complained that they never went anywhere, never ate anything but steak and potatoes, and he’d say it as though it were the thing about which he was proudest, something commendable, something my mother might not have noticed if he hadn’t pointed it out)—also embalmed him, ran in his veins like that gray March rain.

Every morning, he would mix a spoonful of vegetable fiber into a glass of water, stir it around and around, clunking his tablespoon against the side of the glass until that water was the color of dullness itself, and then he’d gulp it all down in one deep swallow that seemed to go on and on—

“Ah!” he’d sigh. “That’s good,” setting the empty glass down hard on the kitchen counter.

It was a laxative, and kept him regular, and he appreciated that.

Occasionally, after drinking this dull cocktail, he’d exhale a long, slow fart, and my mother might throw her dish towel down and mutter, “Jesus Christ, Brock.”

She hated those farts.

He’d smile, big and happy, and say, “Excuse me!”

When I was ten years old, my father took me with him to his office at the Board of Education. Perhaps I’d had no school that day. Maybe I’d asked to go. Or was it his idea? Was there something there, at his office, he wanted me to see?

What I saw stunned me then. It mystifies me now:

My father was loved by women.

Old women and young women. Fat and thin. Married, single, serious women, and empty-headed flirts.

To get to his office, we had to walk down a long, gray corridor of women. I was a child. I would have been holding my father’s hand. He would have been wearing shiny shoes, a black suit. Even then, he was gray at the temples, but his features were chiseled out of solid rock—not at all like a man with the kind of job he had: a job telling women what to do. Ruggedly handsome, my father spent his days at the end of a telephone with a felt-tipped pen in his hand, doodling onto a legal pad.

I’d seen those doodles.

Stars. Pyramids. Bull’s-eyes. Once, a pair of women’s shoes with a woman, drawn only up to her ankles, in them. Above her ankles, just air.

Still, my father had the features of a French legionnaire. An aristocrat. A mystery writer. A painter of abstractions. Give him a series of hats—a black beret, a turban, a sailor’s cap—and you could have had your classically attractive anyman: sailor, artist, sultan. Instead, he was simple. Friendly. A school administrator. As he passed the secretaries who were at his disposal with their beige panty hose, soft breasts behind soft sweaters, toes pinched into skinny shoes, my father glistened.

“Good morning, Mr. Connors,” a woman with a file folder in her hand said, fanning the folder in our direction, opening her eyes wide. “Is this your daughter?”

“No.” My father raised his dark deadpan eyebrows at her. “Mindy, I’d like you to meet my new secretary, Kat.”

Every time my father said this, and my father said this all day, a woman would open her slippery red mouth as wide as she could to laugh.

What’s wrong with this picture? I thought, remembering the puzzles we puzzled out in kindergarten—

Three dogs and a toaster: Which one doesn’t fit?

At home, my father’s corniness would be met with grimaces from my mother, pain spreading itself across her face as if she’d been poked in the small of her back by a very hot pitchfork, or she’d shake her head. She might say, “Oh, please,” or leave the room—or, if they were in the car together, look out the window blankly, saying nothing.

But here, his corniness was charming. Back in their break room, over cups of instant coffee and sandwiches slipped out of plastic bags and a haze of cigarette smoke winding exotic, haremlike, around them, those secretaries must have talked about my father like a pleasant, shared master. Here and there, a foot was slipped out of a shoe, tucked up under a thigh.

He could have had one or two of them, I’m sure. The skinny blond. The sweet and slightly giddy one. The one with shapely calves sashaying beneath her pleats.

Flattered to be chosen, she would have kept it quiet. She’d have met him on the sly, in a motel, black teddy stashed in her pocketbook, diaphragm already in. She’d have done whatever she could to please him in bed, just as she always tried to do his typing with a flourish, file his papers with style.

Then, back at work, she’d have kept her mouth shut. She’d have stopped lunching with her girlfriends if she had to, started keeping to herself. And when, a few months later, he broke the news that he couldn’t risk it anymore—his wife was asking questions—she might have been generous enough to quit, to find a job in another office, even if it meant a bit less pay, the loss of some fringe benefit she’d grown used to having but could, finally, manage without. And, years later, when she passed him with his wife and daughter on a street in town, she would politely look down at her shoes and walk on.

But my father was far too simple for this.

His imagination was limited, and, for whatever reason, it was only my mother he loved.

I know.

I know because I was their daughter. Their only child. The product of their marriage. A soft, lopped-off part of it. I saw the looks he sent her, though he hardly spoke to her. (“A man of few words,” my mother would snort at his back when he’d offered a one-word answer to some complicated question she’d asked.)

Still, for sixteen years I saw the way he passed the butter dish across the dining room table to her, as if he wished it could be more, as if he wished she could lift the lid and precious gems would spill all over her dinner, as if that might finally make her happy—an inedible, improvident gift, like easy, unexpected laughter.

There was never any of that in our house either.

“Evie, what can I do to cheer you up?” he might ask her on a Saturday when she’d spent all day complaining. He meant a movie, a drive, a quart of ice cream. She’d say, “Just pick up your dirty socks. That’s all I want,” and she’d be looking hard at his feet propped up on the ottoman when she said it, her jawbone making vicious little squirrel movements when she closed her mouth.

But the fact that she hated him did not seem to lessen his love for her. When she was late coming home from the mall, he’d twist the snug wedding band around and around on his finger—always conscious of her, not forgetting for a minute that he was married, looking out the window at an unfathomably high and empty sky.

He had her photo, too, enlarged, on the wall of his office, framed in oak. In it, my mother smirked into the sun at the slippery edge of a river—the Chagrin River, which ran past our subdivision, a famous river:

Once, between Cleveland and the lake, an oil glaze on that river caught fire like some stripper’s slippery negligee tossed onto the water, and it went smoking through the city and its valley of warehouses, steel mills, refineries, rubber factories—through the suburbs, where the stench and the fames and the flames were politely ignored—and it passed, then, into the country, spitting cinders into the wind, burning itself past the gawking sheep and cows, burning itself down to the great, polluted, viscous, all-forgiving mouth of Lake Erie.

That afternoon, when I was ten and went to his office with him, two or three times my father stood up from his desk, went over to that photograph on the wall, and looked carefully into it. Then he’d sit back down, seeming thoughtful, and watch the snow fall in soggy fragments of light outside.

I sat across from him. It was a long afternoon. The light from the window was so bright, we could barely open our eyes. My father tapped his pencil on his thigh, and as he did, it made a rubbery yellow blur in his hand. His desk was mahogany, buffed, with only a desk calendar, an ink blotter, a leather-bound appointment book and a coffee cup full of pens on it. I could see the elastic band of his Timex peeking out of his sleeve, cuffing his wrist with time as if he were its prisoner—time turned to x’s and scattered into the void.

My father didn’t seem to have any work to do that afternoon, and it bothered me. I could too easily imagine him sitting in that chair every day, watching the sky throw wet blankets all over the world—the parade of his life passing by the window with its threatening clowns, big-breasted women on the backs of white horses, asthmatic elephants wheezing in an icy rain as he tapped a too sharp pencil on his thigh.

As he tapped, that pencil made a solid, dispensable sound.

Then, after about half an hour of this, his secretary came in—all business, but her cheeks were flushed. She had on too much cheap perfume, and it trailed her in scented veils, filling my father’s office with an awful sweetness, like decay. It was a smell I recognized because, during that fall, each morning on my walk to school I’d passed a squirrel that had been flattened by the tires of a car and tossed to the side of the street, near the curb, where it was slowly vanishing—

And, although, after my first glimpse of that bristled, ash-blond fur softened by blood and guts and time, I’d cross the street to avoid seeing it again, I could not avoid smelling it, and the smell of it got stronger every day—sweeter and sweeter.

More like roses steeping in sugar water than dead meat by the second week.

Like an angel’s miscarried fetus by the end of the month.

Some precious rag from heaven dropped and stinking now. Lost sweetness itself by the side of the street.

This was how my father’s secretary smelled, and what she reminded me of as she handed my father a pink square of paper, smiled at me, and left—thighs rubbing nylon lightly across nylon high up under her skirt as she walked. Then my father waved the little square in my direction. “You have a dentist’s appointment tonight,” he said. “Your mother called.”

Of course, I must have known already, since she’d left the message with his secretary as my father sat in his office, only too available to talk, drumming a flaccid pencil on his pants and staring out the window, that she hadn’t wanted to talk to him. But my father looked across his nearly naked desk—just those doodles on a legal pad—and said, anyway, “Guess she didn’t want to talk to me.”

There was that watery expression on his face.

After she disappeared, he would wear that watery mask every day.

IN THE MORNING, PHIL COMES OVER. I SEE HIM CROSS HIS yard into ours through the shallow garden where Mrs. Lefkowsky—who lived next door until she died last year—planted her hundreds and hundreds of daffodil bulbs. They’re deep under the snow and frozen mud now, like Mrs. Lefkowsky herself, but I can imagine them as Phil trudges over in his big boots, that yellow writhing in the dark, a little light down there, like something you keep in the back of your mind, or buried in your backyard.

It’s Saturday. My mother has been gone for one week and one day. I’d count up the hours and minutes, too, but she left on a Friday afternoon while I was at school, while my father was at work. We came home to no one. She didn’t leave a note, never packed a bag, only the quick phone call the next day to tell my father she wouldn’t be back, and then the nothing.

It is a serious matter, I know. The kind of thing that makes the six o’clock news, gets into the local paper. When you go to the supermarket, you see her face on the bulletin board between BABYSITTER NEEDED and I WILL SHOVEL SNOW, and you pause, look at her face, wonder briefly who she was and where she went before you stack your silver shopping cart with frozen TV dinners.

At school this week, no one said a word to me about my mother’s disappearance, but my teachers seemed shy, and friendly, and even Melody Little, the most popular sophomore girl, nodded at me in the shower after gym. She looked as slick as damp plaster in the steam, but the hot water had turned her thighs fire-truck red.

It is that kind of serious matter—the kind that makes people who don’t know you like you, speak softly to you, avoid your eyes—but for some reason, I cannot take it seriously myself. I find myself smiling, instead, all the time, laughing too hard at jokes on TV. Last night I couldn’t catch my breath as Johnny Carson did a bad impersonation of George Bush, and my father looked at me sideways, his face lit up in the Tonight Show glow, and said, “Kat, are you really that happy she’s gone?”

It wasn’t an accusation. He simply wanted to know.

But after he asked me that, I thought I’d better try to start looking more serious, or troubled. Still, as hard as I try, I can’t get this smile off my face.

I don’t tell my father about the dreams.

Night after night I’m in a cave of snow, or my mother is calling to me but I can’t find her in the whiteout all around us. I’m driving slowly over a frozen pond, hear it cracking under me, but can’t open the car door to jump out. Then, there’s snow in the headlights, and suddenly I’m driving ninety-five miles an hour, and she leaps into my path wearing nothing but pearls. I swerve, but I’ve hit something soft and solid, thrown it to the side of the road, and, when I go back to find it, it’s gone.

Or the light is too bright to find it. Or a white scarf is tied around my eyes. Or the bedroom window’s frozen: I can’t open it. It shatters instead—luminous, flashing—and when I finally see her face, it’s featureless. A helium balloon. Bloated. Her hair, you guessed it, is pure white now, like a white wig on a Styrofoam head, the kind in the window of the wig shop. She’s standing on a crust of snow outside the wig shop in a white nightgown, and there’s a halo hovering above her head—a band of frozen, electric stars.

They make a whirring sound, revolve into the distance as she starts to run—and that halo, like a hubcap, spins away from my tires and lands, invisible, in a snowbank in the distance.

That halo, had that really been my mother’s?

When I wake up, I seem to remember my mother actually wearing a halo like it, standing above my bed in the middle of the night, and it bothers me. I wrack my memory for the details, and can’t get back to sleep.

Phil wants me to see a shrink. He got the idea from his mother.

Like my father, Phil is simple.

Scratch the surface, and there’s just more surface—chalk dust under your nails, but not much else. What you see, as they say, is what you get.

And this is what you see:

He has white-blond hair, which he parts in the middle, combs back over his ears. His hair is stuck in the seventies, as if he is a rerun of Three’s Company—cute, but caught in the time warp of television. It’s long in the back—at least an inch below his collar, where it curls up smoothly, ladling light. He’s tall, but not broad shouldered, so he appears perpetually to stoop, as if he’s just stepped into a room with a low ceiling, as if even the sky might not be high enough for Phil.

He thinks he is a ladies’ man, and, as with the idea of me going to a shrink, I think he got this impression from his mother, who is blind. On our second date, he brought me next door to meet her, and she said, “My son is pretty, don’t you think?” moving her white fingers around on his face. He pushed her away—gently, but it was a push.

Before she disappeared, my own mother said, bemused, watching Phil cross our lawn on his way to our house, “That boy thinks he’s a crumb off the loaf of love.” Something in the way he was carrying himself must have made her say it. Jaunty teenage rooster. Cocky. A boy who likes the way he looks when he catches a glimpse of himself in the bathroom mirror.

Even my mother must have been, as I am, charmed by Phil—his naked pride, walking around all day with his ego exposed, the boyish vanity.

As I’ve said, his mother is blind, and his father left them two years ago, so Phil is now the one who leads his stone-blind mother around town by the arm.

“Here’s the railing,” he might say, folding her bony fingers around a railing.

“Here’s the ladies’ room”—placing her hand on the doorknob, looking worried as he lets her go into that darkness alone.

Once, their white cat, Snowman, escaped when Mrs. Hillman opened the front door to feel her way to the mail, and it ran, belly close to the ground, across the street. That cat had never been outdoors before, and it cowered stupidly on the front stoop of the house across the street. From the living room window, my mother and I watched Phil go after Snowman, pick him up, and cradle him like an infant in his arms, bring him home to his blind mother.

“What a good boy,” my mother said.

I’d be lying if I said I’d thought much of him, or about him, before he stopped me in the hallway of the high school one day and said he’d be moving in next door. I remember saying, “How do you know where I live?” and he’d looked hurt, as if I were accusing him of something.

“I saw you in your driveway,” he said.

“Great,” I said. “Welcome to the neighborhood.”

He looked relieved. He looked down at my shoes, which were flat and black, a pair I left in my locker so I wouldn’t have to walk around in rubber boots all day. I was wearing a maroon sweater and a pair of faded jeans, size fourteen. But my feet were small. They were the feet of a girl God had intended to be thin, but who’d mushroomed, instead, like a cloud.

Phil smiled at my shoes. “I’m looking forward to being neighbors,” he said.

A few days after that first give-and-take, a week before he and his mother moved in next door, he stopped me again in the hallway. Wearing a sweatshirt that said PROPERTY OF OHIO BUCKEYES, he looked nervous, itchy, a boy with a bad burn just starting to heal somewhere you couldn’t see. His hair looked yellow under the washout of the hallway’s fluorescent light, and the skin above his upper lip was naked, scraped. That day, his blue eyes were naively wide and gray.

“Kat,” he said, “would you want—you know—to go to that dance?”

Winter Formal.

It had never even crossed my mind that anyone would ask, and certainly not anyone with Phil’s good looks and calm cool. He wasn’t one of the most popular boys. He wasn’t on any teams, but more than one girl was rumored to have a crush on him, to be going somewhere with him. And the popular guys seemed to have respect for Phil. He was tall, and looked strong. I would occasionally overhear those guys talking about the weekend parties that had taken place at someone’s house while their parents were out of town—and Phil had been there, he’d brought beer, and had drunk it, and acted crazy. He was not obscure. The cool kids knew who he was, which, in a way, created him.

If every soul is just a thought in the mind of God, then every student at Theophilus Reese High School is just a thought in the minds of the cool kids. Without that, you are nothing but a gray shade, indistinguishable from the cinder block, blending into the dull shine of the lockers, something with a shadow but without substance.

Our high school was named for a farmer whose cow got loose in what was once woods and is now the football field. He chased it all day. He got thirsty, and hot, and then there was a thunderstorm, and Theophilus hid, stupidly, under a tree, which was struck by lightning. Out of the lightning, God spoke, or so the story goes, telling Theophilus to chop down all the trees and build a church.

He did, and found his cow.

Now, there are twelve hundred teenagers who go to school where that church once stood, and some of them are rich, and beautiful, and poised, and witty, and well-dressed, and always have been. When they walk down the hall together, it is like a wall of power, all ecstatic laughter and glamour.

They are like gods among the rest of us, walking faster, looking better.

And those kids knew who Phil was, but I was invisible, and fat. Why would he ask me? When he asked, I shrugged, half thinking that this was a joke, a prank his buddies had put him up to. “Sure,” I said, as if I were doing him a favor—no skin off my nose—and he looked a bit deflated: one of those fireworks on the Fourth of July that fizzles out halfway into the sky.

That night, the night of the winter formal, I was 140 pounds of myself in a long pink dress, but Phil didn’t seem to care. He walked from his house next door to get me in a rented tuxedo with big sixties lapels—brand-new but out of fashion—and he looked good in it, like a mock-up of the perfect first date. Teenage heartthrob. Lean but muscled.

My mother had taken me to buy the dress, and everything I tried on displeased her. “Your coloring is good,” she often told me, by which she meant the pale skin, dark hair, blue eyes that mirrored hers, “but you’re forty pounds overweight.” I would step out of a dressing room with something long and ruffled on, and she’d shake her head and sigh.

Finally, the pink one was the last straw.

“Oh, well,” she said, “it’ll have to suffice.”

And I was painfully aware of the fat as I danced: its folds, its white cream, its fluid pressure like a rain-swollen creek beneath the dress, which made noises like a thousand little girls whispering viciously against my flesh.

Garden Heights, Ohio, is not a place to be plump, to be homely, or malodorous, or scarred, or shy. There were girls from my high school at that dance in strapless black sheaths and four-inch heels. Girls as flawless as mannequins, their feet preformed to fit into their mother’s expensive shoes. They didn’t seem to have been born with the nuisances of blood or skin or shame.

Next to them, at this winter formal, I looked like a feminine whale, paddling the air with my thick fins, stuck between a couple of icebergs, going nowhere fast—a sympathetic character, perhaps, but not lovely at all. If, to anyone, I appeared sexual, it would have been the way in which the inside of a cat’s ears are sexual. As nude as scrubbed fruit. A glimpse of something vaguely obscene—obscene because you hadn’t wanted to see it, because you don’t want to think of something as vulnerable, as personal, as a fat girl’s sexuality exposed.

And Phil, in his long-limbed blue tux, seemed to be perpetually dancing the funky chicken—arms jerking around his shoulders as if someone were yanking at him with strings from the sky. He thought he could dance—believed in his abilities on the dance floor with the same kind of stubborn confidence with which he believed he was handsome—and, after I got over my initial embarrassment for him, all that energy let loose like a flightless bird beneath the snuffed gym lights, I started to believe that he could dance, too. Watching him flail in front of me as I shuffled in front of him, I began to understand that dancing well had everything to do with believing you could. Like those dreams of flying—dipping gracefully through the air in your weightless body—if in your sleep, you stopped to think about it for more than half a second, you’d crash like a sack of dead ducks onto the roof of a church.

Phil didn’t stop to think. He just danced.

We both danced, all night. Couldn’t stop. Out of breath within half an hour, but we danced nonstop for three more hours.

A few years ago, about a hundred miles into the country from our suburb, there was a farm plagued by stray voltage. An electric current under the pasture was surging up from Toledo Edison, shocking the cows, turning their hooves to walkie-talkies. There was a lawsuit, and for months on the news we heard the details over and over: The farmer’s wife lost weight, her teeth fell out, his daughter started pulling out her eyelashes lash by lash, biting the backs of her hands to get at the static under her skin. When that daughter closed her eyes, she said she saw sparks. And the barn cats sang terribly in the barn before they died.

But the cows danced the whole time.

Perhaps they’d been driven mad, but they danced, and there had to have been some joy in that. I had never been happier in my life than I was as I danced with Phil that night. It was as if, with Phil—dancing, or fucking, or just driving around and around in the sedan his father left him when he left—I’d finally found something to do with all the nervous tension of that suburb, which surged through the power lines between our houses and street corners like a small girl’s braids pulled too tight, sending an invisible current into the air, a wave of nervous energy rising, falling, rising.

That tension—I would lie in bed some nights and imagine I heard its volts and sparks swell an invisible river above our roofs, singing a high whine in my ears, boring into my brain like a wiry nail, the whole subdivision ringing in my ears, until my head and neck would ache from the weight of so much strident silence.

Like that stray voltage, there was something raucous straining under all the politeness, all the quiet—and, finally with Phil, I found a way to move to it, or sleep through it. I bought a pair of running shoes and a green sweat suit, and when I jogged around the neighborhood—which had seemed so stiff, a stage set of a place, all edges and blades—it melted into a liquid blur, a soft backdrop of flaccid facades and sleepy trees. I let myself get thin, running in circles around Garden Heights. I no longer needed the padding. I had sex.

“ANY WORD?” HE ASKS.

“Not one.” I shake my head and shut the front door behind him. Snow’s coming down now in fat, gray, dirty-washcloth flakes, and they drape the lawns and trees with sluggish infant blankets. Who could blame my mother for leaving this place? The sky is falling.

And, only a few days ago, I noticed a fine layer of dust on the dining room table—the dust she had devoted her life to dusting away. It was already accumulating in gray layers, and it had only been seventy-two hours since she’d left. When I went into the living room, I saw it there, too, swirling around in the air, settling on the arms of her chairs, the coffee table, a galaxy of dust collapsing from inside itself in slow motion, burying us.

It was what she’d been doing, chasing dust, all day, every day.

So I went to the kitchen to get her feather duster with its pink plumes out from under the sink, but when I got back into the living room with it, I had no idea where to start. Dust was everywhere. It was in the light. It was in the air I was breathing. It was graying my hair. I was afraid to use the feather duster, which seemed weightless in my hands. I thought it might make it worse, kick up a whole new storm of dust that would choke or blind me. So, when my father got home from work, I said, “We have to call the Molly Maids. We can’t keep this house clean by ourselves.”

“I did already,” he said. “They’ll be here tomorrow. They’ll be here every Wednesday.”

“Shit,” Phil says, untying the sturdy laces of his brown boots. “How could she do this to you?”

“She wanted out,” I say, looking at Phil’s feet.

When his boots are off, I see holes in his black socks, and each of his big toes looks vulnerable to me, raw on the beige carpet, as if two sacks of skinned mice have spilled, and Phil looks down then, too, as if he’d like to gather up those spilled mice quickly. Then he shrugs.

“So?” he asks the wall behind me, where a painting of the ocean hangs, all melancholy flotsam and churning water.

Seascape it’s called. It’s the only real painting that hangs in our house—a dark ocean my parents bought in a motel lobby in Toledo the year I was born, the year my father got his promotion, the one that turned his youthful energy into a heap of laundry every night at my mother’s feet, the year they moved with me to Garden Heights.

STARVING ARTISTS’ SALE, the sign on the highway said, and although my mother must have muttered, “That cheap junk, who wants that?” my father insisted they go, and they went. He took one look at Seascape and happily paid the forty dollars to own it.

Sometimes, I’d run my fingers across that canvas just to feel how thick and sticky the paint in all that choppy water was, the places the painter had gobbed on too much blue. The horizon was ominous and, with some imagination, you could smell salt, dead dolphins, weeds reeking on a beach. A thin line separated the water from the air, and though I hated the painting itself, that line was definite. Incontrovertible. There was absolute emptiness between the sea in that painting and the sky. It was a space that existed simply because nothing was in it.

“That’s no excuse,” Phil says.

“Who needs an excuse?” I ask.

He looks at me. There are snowflakes melting on the bridge of his nose, and his eyes are wide. I see myself in the small blue ponds of them, seeming brighter and sweeter than I am. My face is pouty and young in this reflection. I lean a little closer, looking for myself, surprised at what I see, and wonder what I’d expected: Had I expected to see my mother?

Phil looks at me strangely, looking at him, and says, “I’m worried about you, Kat. Your face looks frozen.”

I try to stop smiling.

He says, “You’re going to crack.”

ONCE, I SAW A SHOW ABOUT EARTHQUAKES ON PBS. THERE was footage of bridges buckling and families shuffling through the open-air wreckage of what had been their homes, as a professor from Stanford explained in the background how there are huge movable plates under our continents and oceans and drugstores shifting around while we’re watching television, or eating party mix, thinking about other things.

And even though the families picking through the trash for their belongings were either Turkish or from California, it seemed like a likely event to me. It seemed to me that something like it could happen to us at any time: an earthquake here in the part of the world where there were no faults, where, instead, a thick layer of mud kept our pharmacies and supermarkets and houses stuck.

Garden Heights is, as I’ve already mentioned, proud of its newness, the sameness of its designs, but the houses in our neighborhood seem like imitation houses. Cheaply made, pieced together overnight with materials that did not come naturally from this world—plastics, pressed woods, drywall.

The houses are not inexpensive, but they must have been put up hastily. Who knows what they were built on? When I stand in the kitchen, I can hear every footstep my father takes upstairs. When my mother was here, I could hear the hangers clanging in her closet while she got dressed, and every word she said to my father, and even the thin, atomized sound of her cologne as she sprayed it. When I’m quiet, I still can, as if the ceiling is made of onionskin and very flimsy hope.

Our house, like all the houses on our block, has three bedrooms—mine, my parents’, and a guest room, the door of which is always kept closed. On the rare occasions that door is opened, a cool breath of mothballs rushes into your lungs, as if the past is a guest, trapped in there for years and trying to escape.

The living room has two green-winged chairs and a floral sofa with a brocade trim, which matches the chairs, and in the den there is a tweed and over-soft couch—which is, I imagine, supposed to be the masculine parallel to the feminine living room. Informal to formal. Comfort to decorum. As though a line has to be drawn between my father’s world and my mother’s. Like the horizon in that Seascape, or the door between the finished part of the basement and the unfinished part.

The finished part has a pool table no one has ever used, the orange vinyl couch with black patches of gummy tape addressing its old wounds—something left over from my parents’ poor, early married days. On weekend evenings when Phil is busy with his mother, Beth and Mickey sometimes come over, and we drink Boone’s Farm Apple Wine down there, look at those Penthouses. That wine tastes like something sour squeezed out of a May day, and after a few glasses it burns greenly behind the eyes.

The unfinished part of the basement is our family’s personal wasteland: cement floor with a drain hole like a navel leading directly from our home to the sewer, the Chagrin River, then into the huge, burning cesspool of Lake Erie. Just the washer and dryer—water and air, those elements tumbling their fuzzy stars and flowers with our underwear, our socks, our soggy monogrammed towels—and a horizontal freezer full of meat and cookie dough waiting in wax paper, waiting for Christmas, waiting for my mother to bake. Fifteen cubic feet of limbo.

As we sleep, that appliance purrs beneath our beds, kicking on and off inside its strange private life like a big, dangerous pet. The great, white, humming brain of our house.

For sixteen years we have lived quietly in our suburb, with some elegance, some ease, but nothing out of the ordinary. When my mother disappeared, when I said to my father that we ought to call the police, the first thing he thought to say was, “Let’s go to the station. We don’t want them to come over here for all the neighbors to see. Your mother wouldn’t like it.”

And, of course, he was right.

My mother would have wanted to disappear without making a scene, without giving anyone anything to talk about. Every day, she worked hard to keep passion and its violence subdued in our house. From room to room, the tasteful carpet, the sturdy furniture, the neutral walls—nothing exotic, nothing bright. Even a little would have been too much, would have stood out, homely, sad, telling the story of her discontent, letting guests know she’d wanted—once imagined—more.

A Chinese vase, a rug of embroidered roses, even a peacock feather would have revealed my mother—naked, longing—for the whole world to pity. She knew this because she’d been to houses like that, the houses of women who served European teas, though they’d never been to Europe, and if they ever did go to Europe, they would see it through the tinted windows of an air-conditioned bus, watching the castles and the Alps roll by, too blurred in the distance to appraise.

There’s only so much beauty women like that can bear. You see them at the Grand Canyon, the Pacific Ocean, Niagara Falls, holding the hands of their bored children—who, having been presented with some wonder of the world are drop-jawed with awe at something altogether wrong: the hot dog that fell on the ground, roiling with red ants, or the retarded man with unzipped pants, or the metal railing that surrounds it, fences the awe itself, keeps the tourists from falling in. They want to make a balance beam of that, to walk the space between death and their safe American vacation, and who could blame them?

The children are just bored, but it is their mothers who can’t bear to look at the thing itself.

Not out of fear. No. They’re too far removed for fear. There are signs to tell you when you’re too close to the edge, bronzed lifeguards blowing whistles when you’ve swum too far. There are rangers in uniforms—and, below you, the Maid of the Mist, drifting into the cool kiss of it, then veering back just in time.

Fear would make sense. But it’s something else. A taboo. An inhibition. A kind of modesty imposed on the natural world by women. Their husbands might be gawking and snapping photos, but the wives call them back to the station wagons and their sandwiches and soft drinks stashed in picnic baskets.

And the suburbs are full of homes like those, decorated by women like that. It gave my mother a seasick chill to look to the bottoms of their wistful teacups, to smell the rueful, steeping leaves sinking to the bottoms of their hand-painted kettles. The pursuit of exotic beauty in such a life would have been like having a ball of tinfoil in your stomach, all that airy metal filling you up with hunger.

And my father was not an exotic man. He’d never been to war. He’d never sailed the sea. He’d grown up in a suburb like the one we lived in now. A life without crisis, or wildlife.

Oddly, he owned a rifle, which his father had inherited from his own father, and which he kept in the basement but never used. He seemed, in fact, afraid of his own rifle. It was kept unloaded, locked up in the same cabinet where he kept his collection of dirty magazines. Like my father’s masculinity, it was useless, and unusable, in the basement beneath our feet. Just something he’d inherited from some earlier era, the manlier man of his father’s father, who must have been a hunter, who must have known how to skin a buck.

Once, my mother went downstairs to put a load of laundry in the washer, and surprised him. He was holding that rifle in his arms like a child.

When she saw him, she said, “Put that thing away,” and he did.

My father was a man who spent his days in an office, doodling, wearing shiny shoes, tapping a pencil on his thigh. All that testosterone surging and spiking like bees in the blood, and not a thing to do with it. On Saturdays, he chased little balls over a long slope of lawn with brilliant clubs, came home red-faced, frustrated, badly beaten, hardly a man at all.

“Beige,” I remember my mother saying to the painters who stood in our living room one summer afternoon years ago—two fat men in overalls holding brushes. It was June, and the windows were open. Outside, a sprinkler whirred in rusty spinning, and a domesticated dog yelped wildly for a moment, then stopped. Somewhere someone was practicing a flute, playing scales over and over, perfect and shrill, like a kind of obedient screaming.

“You could try something else, ma’am. Something different. Shell pink. Or a light blue,” one of them offered.

But she just shook her head.

PHIL HAS THE NAME OF A SHRINK WRITTEN DOWN ON A PIECE of yellow paper—

Dr. Maya Phaler: 878–1675.

He hands the piece of paper to me.

“My mom’s been seeing her ever since my father split. She says it helps a lot.” Phil says this as he walks toward the stairs to my bedroom. He says, “You need to get your anger out.”

I follow him, holding my square of yellow.

Phil lies back on my bed, propped up by the pansy-covered pillows, and he looks, worried, at my ceiling. I sit by his feet and rest my hand casually on his ankle. There, the bone feels hard—a sharp rock slipped into his sock—but he moves it away from my hand as if I’ve pinched or tickled him. Then he rolls over and opens the top drawer of my nightstand, where I keep the cigarettes and condoms and contraceptive foam.

That foam is like something a virgin might find in her mouth one summer morning at the seashore. It’s immaculate, and smells like nothing.

But he’s going for the cigarettes, I know—a fresh, soft pack of Marlboro Lights—and he spins the thin cellophane ribbon around the top in one clean movement, like slitting a fish, but he hands it over to me when he can’t get a cigarette out, jammed together as they are, dry and white.

I scratch one out with my nails and pass it to him. When his fingers touch mine, I snag them and pull his hand to my lips. He has to sit up a little for me to kiss the tips.

I look into his eyes, and say, “Want to have sex?”

But Phil glances back at the ceiling quickly and falls again into the pillow, shaking his head. “No,” he says. “I want to talk about this shrink.”

It’s an excuse, I think, not to have sex, but I let him talk.

When it comes to talk, Phil isn’t much. He’ll pause, look soulful, pound a fist on his knee when he really means something, and you can see he means something, but what it is, well, that’s often lost in a fog of generalizations and half-finished sentences. Listening to Phil talk is a bit like watching golf on television. You see he’s got the moves, nice clubs, appropriate outerwear. You can tell when the sun’s in his eyes. You can see the pressure’s finally getting to him. But no matter how carefully you watch, you’ll never see him hit the ball, and you’ll never see it land.

This has never bothered me. Like my father, Phil is simple, and his inarticulateness goes with this like a sprig of parsley on a Salisbury steak. His monologues are full of vivid and amusing misstatements, the mangling of cliches. Once, complaining that his mother tried to do things that blind people should not attempt, like lighting candles at Christmas, he said, “My mother wants to have her blindness and eat it, too.”

I imagined Phil’s mother spooning blindness into her own open mouth like devil’s food cake. But without texture or weight. Bittersweet and rich.

Another time he said, regarding his father’s late support checks, that calling him in Texas wouldn’t help, it would just make the checks even later. “It’s a vicious circus,” Phil said.

When I asked if he thought that perhaps writing a letter, explaining their situation—the mortgage payment late again, the electric company calling—might help, he said, “I’m virtuously certain it wouldn’t,” looking martyred and older than his years.

First Phil bites his lip. Then he smokes. Then he says, “This is too much for you to deal with, you know, alone. This is, your mom taking off. It’s a heavy thing, you know. You need someone to talk to about this load.”

I wait. When he doesn’t say anything else, I say, “Is that all?”

“Yeah,” he says. There is a rope of smoke around his fist. He looks at it.

“Fine,” I say. “I’ll call the shrink. Want to have sex?” I don’t want to talk to Phil about my load. I want his skin to expand and contract like a human sack over mine.

He shakes his head no.

He moves his foot away from my hand completely, and I look down at my own feet, bare on the white carpet, peeking out of footless black tights.

Since I hit 122 pounds last month, I’ve started wearing Flashdance clothes. Little, loose skirts. Canvas shoes and bodysuits. A few weeks ago my father looked at me in one of these new outfits. He’d come downstairs while I was making toast for breakfast, the kitchen smelling like smoke and Wonderbread, and my father said, “Kat, you’re not doing anything, you know, to make yourself thin?”

“I jog,” I said. I shrugged, smiled.

But he looked worried, his face as long as a horse’s looking at my ankles, and I realized he must have seen a show about bulimia or anorexia. He must have thought I was gagging up breakfast after he dropped me off at school. Maybe he was worried that I would get thinner and thinner, until I became as unfindable as my mother, and I felt a stab of compassion for him, imagining my father alone in this house with the white shadows of his two invisible women. I remembered how, one summer, he’d taken a whole roll of photographs of my mother and me. “I want to show off my pretty girls at work,” he’d said, and my mother had agreed to pose with me in the backyard.

He had us stand with the sun in our eyes, squinting into his camera, and kept motioning us backward, to get us in the frame, until my mother finally got mad and said, “I’m not moving again.”

He took picture after picture.

But the film came back from the camera store blank.

“I’m sorry,” the clerk in the camera store said, “your photos didn’t turn out, Mr. Connors.” My father didn’t understand why. He insisted on seeing the blanks for himself, though it took the clerk a long time to find them in the wastebasket where they threw the bad prints away.

“Here,” he said finally. “You don’t have to pay for these, of course.”

“Of course,” my father said, but he stood looking at his envelope of blanks—bright, empty squares without us in them.

“All that trouble for nothing,” my mother said.

“Dad,” I said, and squeezed his upper arm, which felt surprisingly muscled under his blue blazer, “I just used to eat too much.”

He nodded. He said, “That’s what your mother always said.”

DR. MAYA PHALER LOOKS LIKE AN ACTRESS PLAYING THE part of a savvy, worldwise shrink, like someone pretending to be an expert on something she doesn’t know one thing about. I think of Marcus Welby, M.D.—an interview I saw once in TV Guide with the white-haired, grandfatherly guy who played that part, how he’d told the interviewer that people would routinely come up to him on the street and, instead of asking for an autograph, would ask for medical advice.

Dr. Maya Phaler even has a pair of silver spectacles dangling from a silver chain around her neck. Not like an old lady or a librarian, though. Like an actress, as I’ve said—as though the costume people decided she needed a finishing touch. A psychologist’s prop.

Blonde. Maybe fifty years old—but California blonde, like Phil. If it isn’t natural, if it’s a dye job, she’s gone to great trouble and expense to get it right.

Hers is a class act all the way. Even her shoes are dead-on. Psychologist shoes: black, low-heeled, but with tasteful little bows, also black, just above her toes. She’s wearing a two-piece suit the color of key lime pie, and the skirt is well above the knee, revealing slender legs, curvaceous calves—though, just above her right ankle, beneath the beige panty hose, I see a Band-Aid: A bit of recklessness perhaps? A woman in a hurry? This morning she must have slipped in the shower with a razor in her hand.

“Katrina?”

I say, “Kat.”

She’s looking at my insurance card: Although she charges a hundred dollars an hour, I’ll never see a bill. “Anxiety disorder” it says on my paperwork—(Is that what it is when you can’t stop smiling? Didn’t they used to call that joy?)—and it’s covered by the benefits my father gets from the board of education. Full mental health coverage—an attempt, I imagine, to keep underworked and overpaid administrators like my father from going nuts and busting up the place.

Though, as far as I know, my father has never seen a shrink.

Nor has my mother—

Though, clearly, my mother could be anywhere right now, doing anything. She could be visiting a shrink, or at a shrink convention, or studying to be a shrink herself, for all I know. At Harvard. Or Berkeley.

This is the way I’ve begun to think. Every morning I lie in bed and imagine the most absurd place my mother could be.

This morning, the Shrine circus came to mind, which led me to imagine my mother in sequins, brandishing a whip in a cage of yawning tigers. I pictured her going back to a trailer with a clown after the show was over, helping him take off his makeup with a blob of cold cream on a rectangle of Kleenex.

But when the makeup was off—that greasy frown—I couldn’t envision a face for my mother’s new lover. It was as if she’d wiped his face off with the makeup, and he was looking in the mirror for it as my mother filed her fingernails behind him. A clownish blank.

“Katrina’s a nice name,” Dr. Phaler says, fingering the chain that holds her spectacles. “You don’t use it?”

“No.” I shake my head too slowly—perhaps I appear despondent. With a lighter tone I add, “My mother wanted to call me Kat. She wanted a cat.”

Dr. Phaler doesn’t laugh.

“So, on the phone you said your boyfriend suggested you see me. How can I help?”

The question throws me. I hadn’t thought of myself as here for help. I’d imagined I was here to defy analysis, to banter wittily with a professional about my personal life until she managed to wrestle some kernel of truth out of my clenched fist, weasel some secret out of my subconscious mind. Remember Spellbound?

Surely I, too, had something extraordinary repressed, something Dr. Phaler was being paid a hundred dollars an hour to find—the way Ingrid Bergman forced Gregory Peck to remember how he’d slid down a banister into his brother’s back as a child and impaled him on a gate.

Gregory Peck held his head a lot during his long psychiatric sessions, trying to keep it in, twisting around in close-up after close-up, looking exquisitely tortured—all that guilt and grief—while Ingrid Bergman kept on needling him. Couldn’t Dr. Phaler do something similar for me, shine her professional flashlight to the bottom of that well, that quiet ice at the center of myself, where my guilt, or grief, or anger, or mother still was?

Then, I’d have a good long life fall of healthy relationships and mature responses to life’s inevitable ups and downs—spared all the psychosis and neurosis for which I am otherwise headed:

The frigidity, or nymphomania.

The handwashing.

The hair twirling.

The drive to fail, or the compulsive need to achieve.

Perhaps I could dredge my memory, the way Peck did, and make some room in there so I could heal, or begin the healing process.

Except that there doesn’t seem to be much dark mystery in there to dredge.

I’ve tried.

Over and over.

Night after night.

There must be some reason I feel nothing.

Surely it is not just that I feel nothing.

Surely I am suffering some exquisite torture, too. I am sensitive. I am good. Surely I am a victim of something, not nothing. I am not merely devoid of feeling, am I? I must be troubled. The troubled are everywhere. There are books and television shows and whole industries devoted to them—magazines for them to read, hot lines for them to call, uplifting magnets to stick on their refrigerators. They surround us, loving too much, crying real tears, confessing their sins and being forgiven.

But there are no twelve-step programs for people who are selfish, or heartless, or shallow, as most people seem to be. There are no Monday night movies about girls who aren’t troubled at all.

Instead, the girls on the Monday night movies are fragile, and big-eyed, and too sensitive for this world, and the bad things that happen to them bother them a lot. Their beauty is the beauty of suffering endured. You can always see their collarbones under the flimsy dresses they wear, and darkness gathers there.

But I have never been able to imagine myself in one of those movies. Until my mother left, my life seemed ordinary, and dull, and untroubled. No “funny” games with uncles. No vague memories of my father torturing my childhood pets. I never had any childhood pets. Just a glimpse here or there of my mother in a bathrobe, looking annoyed. A few dull family outings—my father with a fishing pole, my mother running after a paper napkin that got loose from the picnic basket and flew across the park. There was a trip out West when I was five. I had to get out of the car to pee in the desert and got red dust on my knees. When I climbed back into the car, I asked my father where we were.

“Death Valley,” he said.

I slept all the way to the ocean while a groggy wand of sun moved back and forth across my face.

I remember a beesting at Great Serpent Mound National Park one summer. A twisted ankle at the circus. A Jujube caught in my molar at the movies: I had to go to the rest room to dig it out.

Nothing. Less than nothing. A childhood without trauma. Who ever heard of such a thing?

Even now, I feel just lightness when I consider my life, even more lightness than ever now that my mother’s gone, as if I am carrying a hollow cake with me wherever I go, balancing it on a tray that wants to sail out of my hands like a kite in wind.

What can an analyst possibly analyze out of such a life?

But that’s exactly how it is in the movies: You resist all the lust and tenderness and terror, while your shrink ice-picks at you until your head’s been cracked.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I guess you helped Mrs. Hillman when her husband left—”

Nothing from Dr. Phaler. Not even a nod. Patient/doctor confidentiality, I suppose. She can’t even clear her throat.

“And, I guess, well, my mother left.”

Now she cocks her head as if she’s heard a flute note in the distance.

A few seconds pass.

She says, “Your mother left.”

I lift and drop my shoulder. The left one. The side of reason, and control.

Or is that the right?

I’m looking at her knees, which are like the flat faces of two owls.

“Yeah,” I say. “Yes.”

“Where did she go?” Dr. Phaler asks.

“That’s an excellent question,” I answer.

TWO

January 1987

“I’M UP HERE!” I HEAR HER SHOUT.

“Over here!”

“Down here!”

It doesn’t matter. I’m locked in. I pound my fists on the lid of this—whatever it is—until my hands ache. She’s out there, telling me finally where she is, but I’m stuck in this cold, locked box. This void. This square cut out of winter air with a pair of very sharp shears.

When I wake up, there’s snow spitting under my window shade, melting mid-bedroom, and I remember opening my window before I went to bed, desperate for fresh air because the smell of her perfume—eau-de-vie—wafting down the hall, leaking up under my bedroom door, had been so strong I thought that I might choke to death on the scent of my mother in my sleep.

IT’S A YEAR TO THE DAY SINCE SHE LEFT—WITHOUT A WORD, without a trace, without her coat, without her purse, without so much as a glass slipper dropped behind her in the driveway, run over, crunched to glittering Cinderella bits.

The first few months she was gone, Detective Scieziesciez would call every few days to ask, again, if we had heard from her, and to assure us that he hadn’t. The flyers his people put up all over town—the ones with her photograph, poorly reproduced, grimacing into my father’s camera on Christmas morning—were taken down or blew away in the winter wind. No one even called with some crank clue, some paranoid theory linking my mother’s disappearance to the sighting of a UFO over Lake Erie.

What can you do? It’s a free country. If a grown woman wants to disappear in it, she can. None of the authorities we’ve spoken to has had any authority over this kind of thing, the kind of thing involving women who turn to dust in the suburbs and sweep themselves up. God knows, as the saying goes, where she’s gone. And He’s not talking.

Nor have any of the authorities expressed much concern. When we went to the Bureau of Missing Persons, everyone we spoke to took out a blank sheet of paper and wrote my mother’s name at the top, then wrote “Adult White Female” underneath it, as though that might conjure her up.

If anything, I imagine they felt sympathy for her. Looking up from that blank sheet to my father’s face, down at that emptiness again, they might have been able to imagine her life, and hoped she’d managed to escape.

“We see a hundred cases of missing wives a week,” a missing persons secretary said, laying a hand on my father’s hand, as if it would make him feel better. She had fingernails as long as hooks, a paperback book hidden under her telephone switchboard, Women Who Love Too Much, and she snuck it back out before we’d even left her desk. It seemed, that year, that every secretary in every office had that book on her desk, spine broken.

When she smiled good-bye her teeth looked false and bright.

Just once, Detective Scieziesciez came to the house. It was morning, and my father had already left for work. “Dad,” I’d shouted down to him from the upstairs bathroom while he was huffing around in the hallway waiting for me, “just go. I’ll walk. I’m going to have to be late.”

“Are you sure, Kat?”

He said it generously, but I could tell he was annoyed. His voice sounded thin, transparent, like a piece of cloth stretched tightly over the mouth of a jar.

Tardiness, in my father’s book, was a sin right up there next to homicide, although I knew he wouldn’t reprimand me for it. Always, we’d had a polite relationship, but since my mother disappeared, it had become even more so. It had become something formal, Victorian, lacking even the intimacy of irritation. When I said I didn’t feel well, didn’t want to go to school, or was going to be late, he never asked me why, and I suspected it might be because he was afraid I might tell him I’d gotten my period, and had cramps, or some other terrible embarassment from which neither of us would ever fully recover.

That morning, I was running late for school because I’d spent too much time trying to decide what to wear. I was upstairs, standing in the bathroom with a pile of my own discarded clothes at my feet, naked except for a flowered bra and matching panties. It had been months since my mother left, and the last thing I expected was that Detective Scieziesciez would pull up unannounced in his unmarked car.

I heard a knock on the door, and I peeked out from under the mini-blinds in the bathroom window, and I could see him pacing around down there on our front steps in a trench coat, smoking a cigarette, looking up toward the bathroom window.

I dropped the blinds, grabbed a red turtleneck sweater and pulled it on, a plaid skirt and pulled it up—a kind of schoolgirl costume I’d never truly considered wearing to school—and I ran barefoot down the stairs.

Detective Scieziesciez knocked, again, hard and insistently on the front door as I was opening it, and he lost his balance briefly, knocking on the emptiness, stumbling into the house, and looking like a handsome actor playing the part of a detective—dark-haired, maybe forty years old, five o’clock shadow dusking his strong jaw, though it was still only early morning.

I was impressed by that shadow, that implication of unbridled beard. It made Detective Scieziesciez look like a man with such a surplus of virility he couldn’t possibly shave it off. I’d never actually seen him in the flesh, just listened to his husky voice on our answering machine, seen his letters lying on the kitchen table where my father left them—official messages regarding the ongoing investigation into Eve Connors’s disappearance, which was being handled with appropriate gravity and attention (although, in those letters, often her name was misspelled as Eve Conyers, or Eva Connors).

He introduced himself, asked if he could have a look around.

As I’ve said, I was impressed by the five o’clock shadow, the trench coat, the smell of fresh smoke on the detective, but I was also a little annoyed. It was almost spring. My mother had been gone since January, and it seemed crazy and unreasonable to want to search the house at such a late date. If there’d been a murder weapon on the kitchen counter—a big, bloody spoon—we’d had plenty of time to find it ourselves.

Still, the detective looked damp and sexy wiping his muddy shoes on our rug. I looked down at those muddy prints, affected. Although I realized that I shouldn’t just let this stranger in without checking some kind of ID—a badge, passport, dog tags?—I stepped out of his way and let him pass me in the hallway. The idea of not letting him in seemed more foolish than letting him—as if, while standing on the deck of the Titanic, I’d been offered a seat on a lifeboat and decided not to take it because I was afraid it might spring a leak.

I could smell deodorant soap under his coat, and inhaled as much of it as I could as he passed.

It had been a long time since I’d felt excited—sexually or otherwise. Some time in February, it seemed, a kind of spongy numbness had settled into my imagination, a physical numbness in my brain, not unlike the rather pleasant exhaustion one feels after a long, hard hike. I slept hard every night, never daydreamed, rarely worried about anything more than what to wear to school. I thought, perhaps, that I was becoming more like my father. Food tasted good. Television entertained. Work was work. Time passed, and the weather changed.

And sex seemed unnecessary. Phil and I were still together, still a recognized high school couple, still spending our lunch period together, whispering through study hall, smoking cigarettes in his father’s car on the short drive home from school, but we hadn’t had sex since my mother disappeared, never took our clothes off in one another’s presence again, almost never even kissed.

At first, it had been Phil who seemed to have changed.

That whole first year, he’d wanted to do nothing except fuck. I’d have just climbed into the passenger seat of his father’s sedan, and already he’d have his hands inside my shirt, moving around fast, as if he’d lost something slippery in there. When we parked in the empty lot of some strip mall late at night, the windows would steam up like the snake house at the zoo—the deep weedy humidity of reptiles crawling over and under one another behind glass aquarium cases, and the night around that sedan would be a darkening green, closing down on us like eggs in a huge, watering mouth.

Then, suddenly, Phil wanted nothing—no physical contact at all.

For Valentine’s Day I bought a red satin bra and panties at the mall and invited him over. But he looked sad when he saw them.

“I don’t feel very well,” he said, and I put my clothes back on.

When I looked out my bedroom window I could see something small and blond-furred down there that had been run over in the road. It made a red sash of blood in the snow between two tire tracks. The naked trees were fringed with a loose, bluish fog. It looked like a Valentine—beautiful, brutal, cold—and my sexy underwear seemed to burn against my skin.

I was horny—a word I’d always hated, with its connotation of clumsy eagerness and need—and felt humiliated, standing there at the window, by my desire. It had only been a few weeks since my mother had vanished, and those first few weeks I wanted sex more than ever. I thought about it constantly—in bed, in the shower, in Great Books, in the passenger seat of my father’s car as he drove me to school.

And then one day my desire was simply turned off like a faucet, as if someone had called the water company while I was gone, and when I got back home, there was nothing but a dry, sucking sound when I tried to turn it on.

But as I watched Detective Scieziesciez’s back as he passed through our living room I could imagine straddling his hips in my mother’s armchair, my hands in his hair, my mouth against his. It was as if Detective Scieziesciez shed a subliminal mist of maleness into the air as he passed—musky, intoxicating.

Perhaps, I thought, he had a gun under that trench coat, and knew how to use it. Perhaps, I thought, something exotic might happen right here in our Garden Heights home with Detective Scieziesciez in it.

Detective Scieziesciez looked around the kitchen, turned, smiled at me, and said, “Have your dad call me when he gets back, sweetheart.”

“Is everything okay?” I asked.

“Everything looks perfectly normal here,” he said, gesturing toward the kitchen, where the Formica glowed in the sterile morning light. “Perfectly in order—but, of course, in a case like this, we have to double-check every little thing.”

“Double check,” I repeated in my head, “every little thing.” It was absurd, of course, since my mother had been gone since January, and this was the first we’d seen of the detective, the first visit we’d had from any authority whatsoever. Double-checking didn’t seem to be what he was up to, let alone every little thing, since he’d spent hardly five minutes in the house.

Still, I was hoping he’d come back. When I opened the door to let him out, the early spring air smelled blatantly of sex: snails and garlic and muck.

MY FATHER CALLED THE DETECTIVE THAT EVENING WHEN HE got home from work, and when I asked what he’d wanted, my father said, “Detective Shh-shh-shh wants me to take a lie detector test.”

“You?” I asked. The word shot out of me like a bat flying fast and blind into a picture window. I looked at my father’s pale plate of a face—the face of a man who took an absurd amount of pride in never having told a lie, his face like a bare lightbulb, all nakedness and surprise. My father couldn’t hide anything in the plainness of that.

Once, my mother accused him of lying to her about the price of a strand of pearls he’d bought for her birthday—she didn’t believe they were as expensive as he said—and she’d held them up to the light of the kitchen window, looking hard.

“How much did they cost, Brock?”

“Seven hundred dollars,” he said, sounding defensive, maybe even a little desperate, as if he were being interrogated by the police about a crime he had committed years before, a crime he thought we’d all forgotten about by now.

“You couldn’t have spent more than four hundred dollars on these,” she said, fingering each one critically. “You’re lying.” And she made this last statement with a kind of exuberant satisfaction, turning to fix him with her eyes.

“I’ve never told a lie,” my father said, and he looked angry, backing out of the kitchen. I pictured him then with George Washington’s white wig on his head, an ax in his hand and that expression on his face.

My father’s face was so unlike the face of Detective Scieziesciez, who looked sneaky in a calm, professional way, as if his sneakiness were sanctioned by the state. Detective Scieziesciez looked like a man who could pull the wool over your eyes for a long time—winking, calling you sweetheart, looking soulfully into your hungry eyes. He was a man of an entirely different order than my father—or, I thought, Phil.

A man.

Suddenly, I’d become aware of the line between men and men. Men with badges and hammers, and men who doodled all day on legal pads. Men who’d been to war, and men who’d studied accounting. And it was the former I found myself interested in. I found myself staring hard at jocks and cowboys on television—men with balls and helmets, or horses and whips, men who ate their dinners with their fists, always in a hurry, not two words for their women or their fans. After so many years of hearing and believing that men should be gentle, and sensitive, good listeners, wearers of slippers.

Late one night I watched a television show about some archaeologists who found a Mammoth Man frozen in a block of ice. The archaeologists were afraid the ice would melt, and Mammoth Man would step out of it alive. On television, they were panicked, but in our living room in Garden Heights, I felt giddy with possibilities. Under that ice, you could see he was wearing only a loincloth, and he was carrying a club. I could imagine the smell of him as he melted—hairy seaweed, filth and microbes, the wet dog smell of snow turning into mud.

“Teach Your Man How to Talk About His Feelings” the women’s magazines at the grocery store screamed at the check-out line, but why? I was tired of feelings being talked about. All this talk about feelings, it made children out of adults, adults out of children. Instead of men with their emotions, I started thinking about men with guns. Men in trenches. Hunters, and cops, and Vietnam vets. Men who kept their dangerous feelings to themselves.

I thought maybe Detective Scieziesciez was a Vietnam vet. Maybe he had flashbacks. Maybe he closed his eyes at night and saw whole villages burned up, his buddies blown to damp balloon bits by land mines. Maybe he carried all that with him when he walked down the street in Toledo. Unlike my father, unlike Phil, Detective Scieziesciez might not be safe. He might have committed atrocities in the name of democracy, killed children, raped women, just to protect places like Garden Heights, Ohio, so dull suburban people like us could have VCRs and TV dinners.

I thought of the first policeman I’d ever seen up close—Officer McCarthy—who’d come to our fifth-grade class to lecture us against taking drugs we’d never considered taking, never even heard of. I remembered the way that cop had stood, shrugging and armed, before us, cautioning us not to sniff things we had no idea we’d want, so desperately, to sniff—trying to imagine ourselves, in that classroom, as he chatted on and on about high and stoned and dead as a series of white kites above Ohio cut loose from the twine.

Seeing Officer McCarthy in his uniform had stirred something inside me as Detective Scieziesciez had stirred me that morning. Officer McCarthy, I thought, was the kind of father I wanted—the kind who wore a uniform and dodged bullets all day. The kind who could fix the broken chain on your bike, who’d take his uniform off after work to do it, roll up his sleeves, get grease on his face, swear, and make a mess instead of reading a newspaper in an armchair for hours, sipping Bacardi out of a flashing glass, stiff with the kind of stress no child could comprehend—the kind of stress that loosens a man’s muscles instead of strengthening them.

I wanted the kind of father who might guard the house at night with a gun, who could predict which way a storm would head, who would stand up to my mother when she insulted him to his face, who was able to tell a lie.

Men killed things, and women cooked them. It had been that way since Mammoth Man. It was the way things were meant to be.

But neither Phil nor my father had ever killed a thing. Maybe one or both had run over a possum on the highway, but they’d have felt pretty bad about it, a little sick. They didn’t hunt, or fish, or trap. I doubted my father, in fact, had ever once touched raw flesh with his hands. It was always my mother who’d cooked the meat. Those violent pounds of ground round. Cut-up chickens. That dark, cold place inside a turkey, the one you have to reach up into to pull out the plastic bag of livers and gizzards—frozen, awesome.

My father could never have put his hand up there. If we’d had to count on my father to hunt down dinner, or butcher it, or stuff it, we’d have starved to death long ago.

He didn’t even barbecue.

As far as I know, in all the years they were married, my father never made himself a meal. And after she left, he might tear up some lettuce, open a can of olives, but he needed me to go to the grocery store, buy our bloody dinners, and bring them home.

“Why would they ask you to take a lie detector test?” I asked my father, incredulous.

“It’s standard,” my father said, “in cases like this, I guess.” And he shrugged, looking lost.

The test was never mentioned again. My father never told me when he was going to take it, or what they’d asked him when he did, but a few weeks later a woman called from the detective’s office and left a message on the answering machine, very cheerfully, like a doctor calling to let you know whether you’re pregnant or not.

“Mr. Connors, you passed your lie detector test. Detective Shh-shh-shh wanted to let you know that any further investigation of this sort has been called off.”

I listened to the message when I got home from school, feeling relieved at the tone of the woman’s voice, the happy results of my father’s test—maybe even a little proud, uplifted, as if my child had been elected treasurer or secretary of the student council, a position without glamour but carrying with it a few modest responsibilities—and I left it on the machine so my father could hear it for himself. When he came home, I said, “There’s a message for you,” pointing at the blinking red light by the phone, and I stood behind him as he played it, then erased it, and then he looked at me without expression.

“Whoopdeedoo,” he said.

WHEN SPRING FINALLY ARRIVED IN FULL, WITH ITS MUD AND swampy grass and the pregnant dancing of robins in puddles, I couldn’t help but think my mother might show up again. The snow would melt, and there my mother would be in the backyard, where she’d been all along. Blossoms on her branches. A nervous bird’s nest pecked and braided in her hair—

Not that I think she’s dead, not that I believe for a moment that she could be resurrected, but I do believe, wherever she is, whatever she is, my mother has changed.

Of course she has.

It’s been a long time, and everyone changes. Especially women. I imagine her returning as a younger woman. Paper-skinned, exquisite, carrying a pail of white cherries with her, each one with a worm curled sleepily around its pit.

Or I imagine her coming back as an old woman, rocking in a rocking chair, knitting socks all day—surrounded by piles of those moist, breathy socks.

Even in my dreams, she bears only the slimmest resemblance to the mother I thought she was.

That January, a year ago, when my father first told the police about the argument they’d had, about the phone call from her the next morning, how she’d vowed never to return—when he went on and on in that trembling voice, told the three cops who sat in a blue row in front of us how her own mother had done the same thing, run off on a husband and daughter in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, and how, for months, she’d been acting strange, how she’d bought a miniskirt and a canary and started slipping away for hours without explanation, or sleeping in the middle of the day like a woman who’d been dredged out of a bog, they’d asked if he thought she might be dead. They’d asked if he thought she could have been suicidal, could have done something permanent and rash.

The mouths of those policemen looked as though they’d been wired too tightly. Even when they smiled reassuringly at us, their lips stayed linear, corners pulled back, making a flat line in the middle of their faces.

My father looked at me. I was sitting next to him on a folding chair in one of these officers’ offices. Both of us had our hands folded in our laps as if we were praying or holding on to butterflies—cupped loosely, secretly between our palms—and I just shook my head.

No, I thought then, and still think now. She isn’t dead. The world’s too full, still, of my mother. I think of a pile of leaves my father left raked last fall in the backyard, but forgot to bag, to have hauled away—

Those leaves sank back into the earth after only a few months of rain and snow. They turned first into a layer of thatch, melting into each other, becoming one thing—a thin black mattress that seemed to exhale a cool but festering breath. Then, they started to shrink, curl up, absorbing light like skin, as if you could dig there and find night itself in the center. And then one day they were simply gone, merged with the earth, swallowed up, a damp shadow, something as thick as gravy spilled where they’d been.

Looking into that, I felt my skin crawl with maggots, with the kind of soft, toothless insects that get into your body when you have no more use for it, and shivered.

It’s impossible to imagine my mother like that. I cannot imagine her softened, thawed, decayed, becoming sweeter as she spoils. I imagine her trapped in a mirror instead. A permanent image of her locked into a rectangle of hard brightness, open-eyed.

When she left, she left her station wagon behind, and my father gave it to me when I got my driver’s license. Now, driving it across town, I feel her beside me, giving directions, criticizing the landscape, the other drivers, the weather, which is a big fist of earth and sky with us struggling in it.

And I can hear her in the morning as I pour cereal into a bowl, telling me what’s wrong with what I’m about to eat.

Now, at dinner, I sit in her chair at the dining room table, to get the view from there. My father looks handsome and boring across the table from where she’d be, and my own place shimmers with my absence instead of hers—dust motes, nothing. I try to imagine what she would have thought of Detective Scieziesciez, and remember the way she used to scoff at my father’s weakness.

“You wimp,” she said to him once when we were at Cedar Point Amusement Park and he wouldn’t ride the Nile.

“I’ll get wet,” my father said.

“That’s not what you’re afraid of,” she said, and he wouldn’t look her in the eyes.

And I remember the way she watched Phil move around our house—his lanky teenage body, all breastbone, and the way his spine curved neatly into his jeans—like a woman with something on her mind. I could imagine the younger woman she once was looking back at the woman she’d become, thinking, This is where it’s ended? All those long, sensual years spent slipping in and out of my body like an erotic pond or a fresh, white bed?

I was following my own flesh here?

I’ve sorted through the clothes in her closet for the skirts and sweaters that fit me, that I like, and I’ve taken over the expensive ones—the cashmere sweaters, the linen skirts. But the night before I wear them to school, I leave them in a pile on the bottom of my closet, to rumple them, so they no longer look like the clothes of someone’s suburban mother. When they’re dirty, I don’t bother to dry-clean them. I just haul them to the basement, toss them from the washer to the dryer. They come out altered. Pilled, softer. I figure when she comes back, she can buy herself new clothes.

And some afternoons, when my father’s gone, I lie on her side of the bed, the way I used to find her sometimes after school in mine, and I look at the ceiling that was hanging over my mother night after night.

“SO HOW DOES THAT FEEL?” DR. PHALER ASKS. “YOUR mother’s been gone one year.”

I shrug.

Dr. Phaler is lovely today in a white wool suit. The little silver spectacles perch happily on her nose. As always, her makeup is tasteful and soft. A rose-beige base. Basic red lips. Right now her eyelids are light blue, but she’s done them well—not at all like Charlie’s Angels, that bad seventies blue.

No. The light blue on Dr. Phaler’s lids makes them shine like startling little pools, the kind you might glimpse from a jet over California. I want to be able to tell her how I feel about my mother being gone for one whole year, but what I say instead is what it seems a reasonable person in this situation would say she felt.

“Confused,” I say. “Maybe mad.”

Dr. Phaler looks disappointed. Perhaps she was hoping I’d cry. The one time I did cry in her office, I thought I noticed a swipe of red across her neck, as if she were excited. She whipped the box of tissues out so quickly I knew she’d been waiting a long time to do it. Those tissues were pink and clammy, and they smelled like a thin layer of lotioned skin when I blew my nose in them.

But I don’t cry today. I don’t feel sad—though I also don’t feel confused, or particularly mad. I’ve only said these things because there are no adjectives for this lightness I feel, this whiteness. It’s as though I’ve been caught in a diaphanous net—bodiless, that net holding my whole essence loosely in a breeze. Or as though I have weights around my wrists and ankles, but the weights are lighter than I am, as though I am wearing a dress made of emotion—a damp, invisible mesh. How could I possibly tell her that?

“After a whole year?” she asks, and I look down at my hands, which tremble a bit in my lap.

It was a beautiful year, I should add.

An early spring started one morning in March with a swarm of sudden, glassy, bird cries, and then the cool jewelry of primrose and violet loosened themselves in the dirt. Then summer burst into the world like a gorgeous car accident, opening eyes all over our bodies in the brilliant light. Fall—the smell of pumpkin guts, sluttish and unsweetened. Until winter fell all over us like pieces of heaven, glazed with oxygen or ether, hitting the ground in small, cold shards.

It was like a year in Eden where no Eve had ever lived.

WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL, MY MOTHER TRIED TO CURL MY hair.

“Kat,” she’d say after my bath, standing in the doorway as I toweled myself, steam obscuring us, as if we’d just stepped together into a Hollywood set of heaven, “let’s do something with that hair.”

In that heavenly Hollywood fog, perhaps we had wings.

I remember watching my own face in the mirror of her vanity as she rolled dark hanks of my hair into hotpink cushions. I was maybe seven years old, and in that mirror the whole future was waiting for me like a skyline of cut-glass perfume bottles, silver tubes of lipstick.

She wanted me, as her female child, to be a sylph. A girl like a powder puff. Soulless, weightless, inhabiting the oxygen instead of the earth.

But I was awkward and overweight, with pin-straight hair—so much body on me I could never have lived in air.

And those nights of pink-cushion curlers worn to bed went on forever. I’d dream of Hansel and his older sister, Gretel, in a very dark forest dropping phosphorescent stones and bread crumbs behind them, hoping.

Those nights, knowing I’d wake without curls to my mother’s disappointment, I couldn’t roll over in bed because the curlers, tight as they were, would yank at my scalp. In my dreams I’d grab, panicked, for the fists of the witch who’d gotten hold of my hair, before I woke, remembering who and where I was and the curlers on my head.

Then, in the morning, she might even seem pleased. “Well, it’s not curly, but it’s fuller.”

And briefly, she’d be right. The hair stood away from my head as if it were offended, but as the day wore on, it would settle down, and my mother would gaze across the dinner table with an annoyed expression on her face. She’d look at my father, and then at me again as we ate her turkey, like her silence, in thin, white slices.

“Pass the butter,” my father would say.

With the butter in her hand, my mother would say, “Please?” holding it just out of his reach.

“Please?” he’d repeat. Without balls. Without imagination. A film of spit on his lower lip.

She could barely stand to eat in his presence.

I could tell by the look on her face that she wanted to throw her knife across the table and watch it vibrate in the wall. She might have been imagining the sound it would make, boing, as it wobbled there above my father’s head.

By the time I asked for the butter, too, she would be seething.

“You don’t need butter,” she’d say, “you’ve got about twenty pounds of it on your hips.”

“Evie,” my father would say, looking down, counting the peas on his plate.

The first few times we’d tried to curl my hair, it had been her idea. But one night, maybe I was in fourth grade, the eve of picture day at school, when even the kindergarten girls of Garden Heights would be wearing pearls, pink sweaters, a little smudge of frosted lipstick, a swipe of powder on their noses and their mother’s department store blush, I asked her to curl it for me, and my mother shrugged, looked at me as if she were sucking on something sour, and asked, “Why?” She said, “Your hair won’t curl.”

Bless my mother, I think some days, lying on her side of the bed, the bed she shared for twenty years with my father, looking at the ceiling, trying to imagine it from her perspective:

She was so wicked. Such a classic case of resentment and ambivalence bumping and brushing up against all that maternal instinct. The love and hate in her was as vast as space—all meteors, no atmosphere.

There she’d be, idling in the station wagon outside my elementary school, wearing a black turtleneck sweater and small gold hoops in her ears—beautiful and simmering. I’d come skipping out of the orange double doors with my book bag and braids looking like a daughter you might have in an ad, happy to see you, having learned the names of the continents that day. The bloated lung of Africa, the broken arm of Europe in a cast. Now, I could point those out. But, looking at me, my mother would seem to have forgotten who I was, why I was bounding into her car with some atrocity of crayon and construction paper in my hand with “for momy” written on it. She’d seem annoyed by my drooping kneesocks. Or a dry mustache of milk on my upper lip. As we drove home, she’d ask me about my day, but when I started to tell her about art or gym, she’d hush me, turn up the radio, while the announcer told her something she would rather hear, something about casualties and accidents and prisoners of war.

Still, there my mother would be—predictable, reliable—every afternoon, waiting for me. And in the morning, when she dropped me off, she’d hug me tight, kiss my hair three or four times, my cheek, the top of my head. “See you after school,” she’d say, and look at me with sweetness like a sad song played on the radio so many times you couldn’t hear the sadness anymore.

And every Christmas she’d bake fifty dozen of the most elaborate cookies you’d ever seen. Bells and doves and stars. Cookies shaped carefully into wreaths and candy canes, dough dyed green and red, with bows, with miniature poinsettias, the petals of which she’d clipped with little manicure scissors. Finnish chestnut fingers dipped in melted chocolate. Pfefferneusse. Cut-out cookies. Santas with glittering blue eyes, rosy cheeks, coconut beards. Christmas trees crowned with blonde and microscopic angels playing golden trumpets.

She had to use a magnifying glass to decorate their faces.

She had to use a skinny paintbrush dipped in colored egg white to shellac the trees with melted sugar so they glistened as if a fresh snow had just fallen on their branches.

Five dozen per batch.

Fifty dozen before she was done.

By June of every year, she’d have already made the dough, already have ten pounds of it wrapped in wax paper waiting in the freezer in the basement.

We’d gone through two freezers storing that. Years and years ago, the Ice-Master hummed itself to death in the basement. Then the Frigidaire. Now, the Coldspot.

We leave that Coldspot and its contents undisturbed. The dough in there belongs to my mother, and now the freezer is just a shelf collecting our lint and junk. A sock that’s come out of the dryer, crackling with static, having mysteriously lost its mate. Bundles of old newspapers. My father has begun to move those from the basement floor, where they’ve been gathering for a decade, to the top of the freezer.

But for years my mother baked cookies out of that frozen dough, and those cookies made her the envy of the other mothers and their children. Plate after paper plate of her perfect perfection on display.

Still, she’d scowl at me as I ate those cookies.

“Jesus,” she’d say as I bit into the sweet dust of an angel’s wing, “you’re getting fatter by the hour, Kat.”

So, this was my mother. So?

We all had crappy childhoods. So?

And, of course, she never slapped me. We lived in a suburb without violence. My father didn’t drink. He didn’t even smoke. We had peace and money beyond the wildest dreams of 99 percent of the world—as much food as we could eat, as much Pepsi as we could drink. In the winter, we just turned the dial as high as we wanted and there was heat. We simply pressed a handle to flush our waste away. And water—as cold as we wanted, or as hot. What exactly did I want? How much more plenty could I have gotten?

Still, I used to lie in bed at night and imagine a huge, silent bomb detonating over our house, filling the air with a clean, poisonous gas that would get in my eyes and blind me, smell like bleach, kill us in our sleep.

My hair, I’d think in the morning as I passed the mirror in the hallway and caught a glimpse of my own light reflected in it, the refraction of a daughter she didn’t want me to be, a daughter she had and had not wanted to have.

Where is she? I think now, passing that mirror, looking for myself.

Every night I pass that mirror on the way to my bedroom in the half dark of the hallway, and it looks like a cleft in the wall, a crack filled with dreams, tingling, star infested, a door to another dimension.

Where is she? I ask it, looking at me. And why did she leave?

“I’M NOT SURE,” I SAY, AND DR. PHALER NODS. HER WOOL suit shimmers.

Dr. Phaler has clothes like moods. Passive, soft, pastel sweaters. Bitter navy blue suits and scarves decorated with geometric shapes, as sharp as words you’ve uttered and can’t take back, words you have to wear, now, as a punishment around your neck.

She has a few premenstrual dresses, too—too tight, trying too hard to keep too much in, ready to let loose in an explosion of skin, popping the pearl buttons, ripping through the ribbons and lace—though Dr. Phaler is in her fifties. She must be done with blood. Or maybe not—

Once, I arrived twenty minutes early to my appointment and surprised her in the rest room in the hall outside her waiting room. She was wrapping something in tissue paper, and it looked like a tampon, or a newborn kitten—something bloody, with a tail. I might have gasped when I saw it in her hand.

“I’ll be with you in twenty minutes,” she’d said, professionally, throwing whatever it was into the trash.

But today she is a conservative bride, getting married at the courthouse in a hurry. But a bride with a secret, perhaps: Under her white skirt, I can see panty lines—a secret she’s tried to suppress.

“I don’t miss her,” I continue.

Dr. Phaler bites her lower lip. “No.” She shakes her head, and her blonde hair, which she’s cut since I first came to see her about a year ago, clings in wisps to her eyes and lips. She whisks it away with her fingertips. “No, I didn’t think you did.”

Last January, Dr. Phaler would not have given me even this—this little hint that she knew who I was, suspected how I felt. In the beginning she only wanted to hear about my dreams—all those snowstorms I’d lost my mother in, all those locked trunks and frozen outhouses and buses skidding off the ice into ravines. Nodding, nodding, nodding.

That nodding, I must admit, gave me confidence. It was as if that nodding gave an order to everything, an A-okay: The Doctor has heard all this before, read it in a textbook, taken and passed a test on it.

That nodding made it seem as if those details, as random as they appeared, made some sense, added up to something for Dr. Phaler, accorded with her professional opinions, her scientific constructs, and I began to see a pattern in them myself—began to see the ways in which those blizzards represented my mother’s distance, symbolized her emotional withholding, how her disapproval had become a metaphor in my dreams since she’d abandoned me for real, after so many years of cool remove, icy glances across the dining room table at my father and me—

And as I came to these conclusions, Dr. Phaler nodded.

Only once she said, “Your mother sounds cold-hearted,” and then we both nodded in approval at how snugly all the pieces—the adjectives and the nouns and the experience and the dreams—fit: nodded at how simple the mind, in all its complexity, is. Perhaps we each pictured a heart, frozen in mid-beat, locked in a human ice chest.

It was at the end of one of those sessions, in the midst of one of these epiphanies, that I finally cried, and Dr. Phaler whipped out her box of sticky tissues—epidermal and pink.

But as the year spun forward, and I spent every Thursday from 4:00 to 4:50 in her office with its nearly empty bookcases and comfortable purple chairs, she started to ask for specifics. I told her how my mother, since I was a child, had told me I was fat, had not allowed me to put one morsel of food in my mouth without sneering at it—hexing, cursing, poisoning it—first. I told her how, in the weeks before she left, she’d begun to walk around the house half dressed, flirt with Phil, call me a pig in front of him—and Dr. Phaler, blue eyes darting around the room, pressed me for more. I told her about the night my mother came into my room and yanked the sheets off me, demanded to know if I was fucking Phil, called me a slut, and told me I was too fat and ugly to please a boy like that—and, finally, after all the hours of composure and nodding, nodding and composure, Dr. Phaler looked appalled and said, “What kind of mother would do a thing like that?”

It was her first judgment, and it stunned me.

Inexplicably, I felt something rush into my mouth—placenta, tentacles, phlegm—and, without missing a beat, I said, “My mother.”

Of course, it had been rhetorical, and, answering that question, I sounded defensive, angry, all my naked longing and loss in those two words.

After that, at least once a session, Dr. Phaler asked that question, but I no longer answered.

Now, Dr. Phaler is braiding the silver chain from which her silver glasses dangle between her fingers. The fingers are elegant. The fingers of beautiful women—aren’t they always like fancy cookies? Lady fingers.

I could imagine Dr. Phaler forty years ago, a little girl carrying a napkinful of cookies across the jade green of a lawn party in her own honor.

“No,” she says, “I didn’t expect you to say you miss your mother, but I do wonder how her absence for one full year might make you feel.”

I swallow. I say, “Surprised, I guess. I guess I’m surprised.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I guess I’m surprised she could hold out this long. I guess if nothing else I thought she’d come back for money, or shoes, or something else she needed.”

“What about you?” Dr. Phaler sets those pale blue eyes on me. “Is it surprising that she could hold out this long on you?”

Now Dr. Phaler’s glaring at the floor, at the face of my bad mother projected on her expensive oriental rug. She does not approve of my mother. She is paid to disapprove of my mother. It is what psychologists like her do for a living all day all over this country—express outrage at the failings of our mothers.

But why? Among some species, it’s considered natural enough for a mother to gobble down her young—

A mother gets hungry.

A mother gets bored.

And who could blame her? As a baby, you were fat, and pukey, and dull. You knew only a handful of words, but she spent all day trying to talk to you. You clamped your mouth shut as she fed you, then knocked the spoon from her hands, laughed as it clanged across the floor. You shit your pants when she dressed you up, then screamed as she changed your clothes. You threw your shoe from the car window. You scratched your name in the paneling on the side of the station wagon.

“Do you love Mama?” she asked, and you shook your head no, no, no.

Not guilty by reason of insanity, any reasonable jury could conclude.

“Kat,” she says, “I asked you a question. Aren’t you surprised that she could hold out a whole year on you?”

Dear, beautiful Dr. Phaler—

Angel of Naivete.

Angel of Stupid Questions.

For a year her predictability, her belief in the simplicity, the banality, of the human brain has thrilled and astounded and insulted me—

“No,” I say, and shake my head. “It doesn’t surprise me at all.”

SHE’S WEARING A WHITE NIGHTGOWN, STANDING IN THE doorway of my bedroom. “Kat,” she says, “I put my hands in the water, and they disappeared.”

She holds her arms up, the sleeves of her nightgown slip down to the elbows, and I can see that the hands are gone.

“What water?” I want to know: I’m her daughter. I’m worried about my own hands.

“The dishwater,” she says. “I was feeling the bottom of the sink for a spoon. The water was too cold.”

I look at my fingers, which are longer than I remember them. They look fragile, and thin. From now on I’ll be more careful, I think.

I look at my mother again.

There’s no blood.

It’s as if her wrists have sucked the hands into their sockets like something stared at too long, sealed up cleanly in two sealed eyes.

PHIL’S MOTHER SEARCHES THE ROOM WITH HER EAR, COCKING her head, moving it from side to side. “Do you hear that?” she asks.

“No,” I say. “Hear what?”

“It sounds like scratching,” she says, then makes the sound, “Scratch, scratch, scratch.”

“The furnace?” I offer, but she seems unconvinced.

“No,” she says. “It’s electrical. Like radio static. But regular. Rhythmical.”

Phil looks annoyed: One good thing about having a blind mother is being able to roll your eyes right at her without getting slapped. Mrs. Hillman’s face is pointed in his direction, but she can’t see his expression—the boredom and total irritation with which he glares at her.

Still, I’m embarrassed for Mrs. Hillman. I look at her feet. Shoeless, in beige panty hose, they look a bit like Cornish hens, or fists—gnarled, with crooked, plucked wings. Her legs aren’t long enough for those feet to touch the carpet as she sits back in my mother’s stiff armchair, which also has stunted wings. She’s a small woman, with drab curls. No makeup. She’s wearing a housedress with big brown flowers on it—who ever saw a brown flower?—as if the garden’s gone stale, all the roses overdone by sun or rusted in the rain, the gardener having long ago defaulted on his obligations.

Perhaps the salesgirls had a big, silent laugh behind the cash register as the blind lady bought that dress.

Mrs. Hillman is nothing like the other mothers in Garden Heights with their chunky gold jewelry, their designer slacks. She’s nothing like my mother, who, despite her fondness for Phil, couldn’t stand Mrs. Hillman.

“I know the new neighbors,” I said one evening, trying to sound casual. Mrs. Lefkowsky, who’d lived next door to us all the years we’d lived in Garden Heights, had died. It was winter then, too, and a damp snow had begun to fall outside—big, white flakes in the pewter blue 5 P.M. sky. My mother was coming in from outside, and I could see that snow behind her when she opened the front door and stepped into the living room, a blanket of it covering Garden Heights with a camouflage of purity. Some of it was in her hair.

Next door, Mrs. Lefkowsky’s porch light was on, but, of course, no one was home. She’d been dead for a month. The shades were pulled in each of her square windows, as if to separate the dark emptiness on the outside from the dark emptiness inside. Snow had buried her front steps, too—cloaked the roof in white corpse hair, and I remembered my mother’s bitter adages about snow, quotations taken from her own mother:

The farmer’s wife in heaven is plucking her white hen.

Or, God is beating his angels again.

I thought of our dead neighbor, Mrs. Lefkowsky, wearing a pair of skeletal wings in a frenetic afterlife. God going after her with his fists. A flurry of spine and feathers, which turned silver, then grizzled, as they hit the ground.

We hadn’t liked her much, or thought about her often—Mrs. Lefkowsky. She was just the Daffodil Lady, the Widow Next Door. And then she died, and her daughter, along with her stubby husband, pulled up in a U-Haul and hauled her things away. My mother and I watched them from the kitchen window one Saturday afternoon. They were bundled in down jackets, stumbling across the front yard as they struggled with an olive green army trunk between them.

That trunk looked so heavy, I wondered what could possibly be in it. Salvaged bricks? Gold doubloons?

When that trunk slipped between them, it tore a gaping hole in the daughter’s jacket, and a breath of feathers flew out. From the kitchen window it looked as if the daughter’s body were a mattress full of fluff, hacked up. I could see her husband pick them out of his eyes, knock them out of his hair, spit them into the wind like a dry, choking snow.

My father was sitting in his La-Z-Boy with an ankle up on his knee, shaking his plaid slipper. “They’re having some trouble over there,” my mother said to him. “Maybe you should offer to help.”

My mother had worried, after Mrs. Lefkowky’s house was emptied out, that it might be sold to someone of poor quality, someone who might put plastic garden ornaments in the yard, someone with sticky children. So I was eager to give her the good news about Phil and his mother. She’d just come from the dentist, of whom she’d spoken highly for years, and often, and she was smiling.

Apparently, Dr. Heine was an attentive dentist. He polished my mother’s teeth like miniature windows, gagging my mother pleasantly with his fat fingers, leaning over her in a silent and intimate embrace, mingling his minty breath with hers. When she opened her mouth wider, his white shoulder pressed into her neck. “Beautiful,” he said, fingering her gums. “You must take good care of these babies.”

My mother would swallow with her mouth open and try to smile, as if he were strangling her with her consent, with her blessing choking her to death. Then he’d hold a mirror up so she could see her teeth for herself, and she looked gorgeous in that mirror—flushed, lovely, dark hair subtly mussed, a bit disheveled. “See you in six months?” Dr. Heine would ask, and there was a throaty touch of longing in his voice.

Once, after an appointment with him, my mother seemed so satisfied at dinner, sang Dr. Heine’s praises so eloquently, that my father finally got up from the table and stomped up the stairs.

“Your father’s jealous of my dentist,” my mother said as if I hadn’t noticed.

“So who are the new neighbors?” she asked, slipping her coat down her arms, feeling the coat closet for a hanger. The living room was brightly static with TV light, and, in it, I might have looked blue faced, drowned to her. I was still chubby. My hair was straight and brown, cut in a bit of a page boy. My eyes were blue: good coloring, at least. When and if I melted off some of that fat, I’d have that good coloring, and those good bones, which I got directly from her.

“Phil Hillman, and his mother,” I said. “They’re moving into Mrs. Lefkowsky’s house. Phil is in my class. Phil Hillman.”

“How do you know?” she asked.

“He told me today. He told me they bought the house next to ours.”

“How did he know where you lived?” I could see it puzzled and bothered her that a boy knew where I lived. For years, she’d thought of herself as an ocean, and me as a small boat in it.

I shrugged. I said, “He said he saw me in the yard.”

“Do you like him?” she asked, turning her back to me, hanging up the coat. “Not a thug or something?”

“He’s great,” I said. “I like him a lot.” I paused. I wanted to say this gently, knowing what I knew about her, about what I meant to her. “He asked me out. Next Saturday. We’re going to a dance.”

My mother turned toward me again, and her mouth swung open in a small hole of surprise, but she managed to turn it into a yawn. “Well, well,” she said casually, indifferently. “Well,” she said, as if she’d only half heard me, as if, after hours on a treadmill, she’d just stepped off.

My mother inhaled the little 0 with her yawn, then exhaled it over my shoulder, but her heart was beating hard. I could see that. I might as well have dragged her to the freezer by her hair, stuck her face right into it and made her breathe those rolling clouds of frost. In there, she might have seen her own face in a dentist’s hands—a blurred plate, the features she was so pleased with dissolving as she stared.

My mother came over to where I sat on the couch, pushed the straight brown bangs off my forehead, ran a finger from my brow down to my chin, passed her thumb across my lips, which were an exact duplicate of her lips—but smoother, younger, sweeter. “Well,” she said, “you’re the girl next door now, I guess. Pretty romantic.”

I shook my bangs back. “We’ll see,” I said. “It’s just one date.”

“Fat girls have to be pragmatic,” I’d heard her say once about a cousin of my father’s, a fat girl who’d married a crippled man. She’d said it as though she were talking about that cousin, but I knew she was talking about me.

Still, it was my first date, and I was her only child, her younger self, all she had, had ever had, was ever going to have—her life, going on without her, going out with a boy she hadn’t met, to a dance she wouldn’t be at, next to a movie she hadn’t seen, and she might never see.

Already, she was starting to vanish.

I hadn’t even gone on that date yet.

I was still fat.

I was still a virgin.

But my mother could already see what would happen next:

She pictured my twin bed with its starched sheets empty. She pictured me in a bridal gown. She pictured me in a supermarket pulling a child of my own by its fat arm past the fruits and vegetables. She pictured me in a white coffin wearing a lace dress, my face like a wax mask, and a delicate spray of baby’s breath in my clenched fist.

But something wild was going on in that coffin. She looked closer. I was growing shoots and leaves and blossoms. Moss. Bugs. Worms. She leaned over my corpse to kiss my lips, but they were warm instead of cold, and then she realized the dead girl wasn’t me at all. Who was that? Who was that dead girl squirming with life?

And then she realized—

That was her.

Our bodies had been switched. Mine for hers.

Perhaps she gasped when she saw that.

A FEW DAYS LATER, PHIL AND HIS MOTHER MOVED IN, AND my mother was the first person who went over to say hello.

“Welcome to the neighborhood,” she said. “I’m Eve Connors. Next door.”

A woman slipped her thin hand out the storm door, and the hand passed sleepily through the chill mist without direction. My mother had to catch it in midair. She pressed it into her own hand and felt it give—small-boned, with thin, cool skin. “I’m Gina Hillman.” Then, “Come in.”

There was a bit of humidity in the cold, a current of warmth running under it, and that current smelled like thawed water, old leaves, atomized ocean—as if a huge fan, pointed in our direction, had been turned on off the coast of Florida, and, by the time the wind kicked it up and billowed it to us here in our northeastern pool-table pocket of Ohio, it had accumulated the odors of the other states: the fish hatcheries, the sheep farms’ eely wool, the stripped mountains and muddy football fields of Kentucky, the light blue haze of ditto fumes left over from the sixties that still hovered over hundreds of elementary schools between us—that chafed smell of paper, factory waste, the rheumy, old-lady smell of lace, dank and sweet, a fine drizzle of it in our faces. The telephone poles stood out stiff and black against the haze-white sky, like crucifixes minus Christs.

“I’m happy to meet you,” Mrs. Hillman said, ushering my mother in.

My mother had never been in Mrs. Lefkowsky’s house. It was oppressive. The ceiling was beige, and claustrophobically low. The carpet was worn away in patches, as if someone had stood in the same few spots, night after night for years, pawing at the ground like a horse for hours before moving on to another spot.

It was a shabby replica of our own house.

And the new neighbors had bad furniture, too, as bad as Mrs. Lefkowsky could possibly have had—scarlet curtains, vinyl lounge chairs, a coffee table as long as a coffin, with anchors adorning each end. There was even an afghan on the overstaffed sofa with an embroidered replica of the Liberty Bell.

My God, my mother might have thought, looking at that bell. It resembled an enormous breast, and the crack along the side of it was violent, sexual, sewn up sloppily with thick black thread. There was nothing on the walls, only old nails where Mrs. Lefkowsky must have had something hanging—her own Seascape, perhaps—until her greedy daughter and son-in-law carted it off.

There was no aesthetic here, no plan, no organizing principle at all. My mother must have been open-mouthed, looking around that house—my mother, who took such pains with our own house, her own aesthetic of polite denial, conservative grace. My mother, who was always so careful not to overdo anything, must have learned a lesson, in that moment, about what happens when you undo everything.

The decorator here, my mother thought, seemed to be denying the very idea of decoration.

The decorator here, my mother realized, must be blind.

“Welcome to the neighborhood,” she said again into Mrs. Hillman’s blank eyes, one of which traveled over my mother’s face like a little, milky moon.

Mrs. Hillman gestured in the direction of the Liberty Bell as if my mother should sit near it, and when she sat, the sofa cushions surged around her like a warm plaid bath. Then Mrs. Hillman felt her way to the sofa herself, and eased back. Upstairs, someone could be heard—presumably Phil Hillman—singing in the shower. The sound of a young man’s song—naked, muffled by falling water.

“Welcome, welcome,” my mother said yet again—feeling absurd, struck dumb with discomfort.

“Thank you,” Mrs. Hillman said and nodded. Her face was pointed in my mother’s direction. “Can I get you a cup of coffee?”

“No,” she said too quickly and looked at her hands. They were white. Though she’d only come from the house next door, she should have worn gloves, she thought. Or she shouldn’t have come. “I hear you have a son,” my mother offered, “the age of my daughter.”

“Yes.” Mrs. Hillman nodded blindly. “I hear they’re going on a date.”

They laughed.

Two mothers: One of whom, my mother thought—seized with a panic that felt like the fast snap of an elastic band on the delicate skin of a wrist—may never have glimpsed the face of her own child.

Mind you, my mother was never prejudiced against the handicapped. She did not think of them as possessed, or dangerous, or supernatural. She was not the kind of person who would look away from someone in a wheelchair. Instead, she’d look straight into his eyes and say hello, as if to let him know she was not superstitious, or ignorant. She did not think of herself as superior. She knew perfectly well it was only a matter of a few seconds in a station wagon on slick ice that kept her out of a chair just like it.

But, like everyone else, my mother carried a million fears with her wherever she went—phobias, trepidations, anxieties—most of them groundless, she supposed. Fables and old wives’ tales.

Still, she carried them with her, as if in a tin—a pretty tin, the kind grandmothers keep beads and buttons in, a tin fall of fish, stars, and trinkets.

And the blind were in it—along with bearded women, cancer, amputees—tapping their way across the intersection with their white canes, coming at her.

Ever notice how, if a blind man is headed in your direction, whichever way you try to escape, he will be headed that way?

Once, she’d had a blind teacher in elementary school. Mr. Ferguson. Music. The children in that class would pass notes to one another, make faces, put their heads down on their desks and sleep.

He was the first blind person my mother ever saw up close, and his face was badly shaved, pockmarked, pale. He wore dark glasses, but my mother could see that the eyes behind them were always open, as dispassionate and inorganic as Ping-Pong balls. His voice was frail and wavering, and when he sang he’d lift his chin toward the ceiling and sway sleepily—

My mother imagined him alone in his bed every night in the black, crooning like that to the silence, and she hated that picture. It was how she imagined death. Night closing down on you like a lid. No way out. Brightly, emptily white, or pure fluid darkness.

Perhaps my mother remembered this as she looked into Mrs. Hillman’s eyes, then looked past her, around her house—the layout of which was identical to ours. Except for the smell of it, Mrs. Hillman might not know the difference between her own house and ours, and to think of that gave my mother a chill that began behind her knees—to imagine Mrs. Hillman in our home, to think that one day she might pull into our driveway and find Mrs. Hillman stumbling across our lawn, believing it was hers, or in our hallway. How was she to know where she was, or wasn’t? My mother imagined Mrs. Hillman feeling her way to our bathroom, washing her hands in our sink, slipping into one of our beds without ever opening her eyes.

“Winter Formal,” my mother said too cheerfully. “Yes. Tomorrow Kat and I are going to look for a dress.”

Look—it echoed off the bare walls. She wished she’d used another word.

“Yes,” Mrs. Hillman nodded. “Phil’s renting a tux.”

“Kat’s excited,” my mother said.

“So is Phil.”

Mrs. Hillman’s chin drifted toward the kitchen, and my mother looked in that direction, too. There was the sound of footsteps overhead, a door opening.

First, my mother saw his legs, in jeans. The big brass buckle of his belt, and then the skin of his stomach, and the sparse, damp hair on his chest, between his nipples—those hard, dark buttons of flesh. She could see his ribs—he was boyishly thin—how they tapered into his waist as if a witch’s bony fingers had grabbed him from behind, as if the witch were squeezing him. His face was long, shaved. Dark eyebrows. But his hair was light—the straw blond of a child—and it was wet, combed back. When he saw my mother, he said, “Oh.”

“Phil,” Mrs. Hillman said without turning in his direction, still speaking to the kitchen, “this is Kat’s mother. Mrs. Connors. Our new neighbor.”

“I’m sorry,” Phil said, covering his bare stomach with his arms. “I heard something. I didn’t know anyone was over. Nice to meet you, Mrs. Connors.” And he hurried back upstairs.

There was a hollow place in his back where his spine swerved neatly into his jeans.

PHIL AND HIS MOTHER ARE AT OUR HOUSE THIS AFTERNOON because their basement flooded last night, and now the plumbers and the forty-dollar-an-hour workers have come to patch and bail. They’re pounding in and out of the house in their big boots with the doors wide open on a ten-degree winter afternoon.

Last night, while Mrs. Hillman was bathing—hot water and bubbles spilling over her—she’d heard the rush of bursting pipes, the gulping ocean roar of plumbing run amok. “Phil!” she’d shouted, feeling her way out of the tub, both hands gripping the slick rim.

Phil pretended not to hear her at first. He thought she just wanted something, like a sponge, or that she’d dropped her washcloth, or she’d slipped, or she couldn’t find her bathrobe because it had fallen off the hook, and he couldn’t bear to walk into the bathroom, to see his mother’s long breasts naked, to see her soaped and groping toward him with her needs, her panic disguised as impatience—

“Where were you?” she’d want to know. “I’ve been shouting for ten minutes.”

But then he’d heard the basement overflowing, too. Water, he told me on the phone a few hours later, sounds just like fire, and his first thought was that the house had burst into flames, that he’d have to haul his mother out into the snow without her clothes, that she’d catch pneumonia and die—or worse, that she would suffer for a very long time, complaining.

Now Mrs. Hillman is cocking her head in our living room again—a mechanical Mrs. Claus in a Christmas department store display. Phil bounces his foot nervously, ankle on his knee, glaring at his mother. He looks rangy in a flannel shirt this afternoon, thermal underwear beneath it, like a blond boy playing the part of a woodcutter in the high school play.

She listens. Fogged eyes wide.

“It’s nothing, Mother,” Phil suggests. “It’s probably the furnace, like Kat says.”

“Do you want some more coffee?” I ask politely, trying to make up for Phil’s unkindness—his tone, which is the tone of an angry youth, a disrespectful son, one who needs a father around to frighten him now and then.

“No,” Mrs. Hillman says, fidgeting with the rim of her empty cup, looking worried.

“Maybe it’s my father,” I offer. He’s upstairs, and won’t be coming down as long as Phil is here. Although my father admires Mrs. Hillman—her spunk, her homely courage (“She’s a good woman,” he says. “The kind of woman you could hang your hat on if you had to”)—he refuses to come into any room Phil’s in. This has gone on for more than a year now, since before my mother left, since the afternoon he caught me with him in my bed, Phil’s naked ass rising and falling over the pale shadow of my body.

It had been an accident. Until then, Phil and my father had gotten along well—nervous and polite in each other’s company, chatting about football, looking respectfully at the emptiness just beyond each other’s shoulders as they shrugged and nodded.

But my father had come home from the boat show in Toledo early. “Daddy,” I’d called to his back as he hurried down the hall. “It was my idea.” But he didn’t turn around. I could hear water running in the bathroom sink behind the closed door for over an hour.

“I’ll look around,” I say in Mrs. Hillman’s direction, “if that will make you feel better.”

“I’m sure I hear something,” she says, which means she wants me to look around.

Phil’s hands turn into fists, as if he’s just grabbed two slim throats in them. Maybe he hates her, and who could blame him? It would be nearly impossible to be her son. Her stubbornness. Her needs. “What will I ever do?” Phil asked me angrily one afternoon as we drove together to the grocery store on some errand his mother had sent us to do. “I can’t ever leave, now that my father has. She can’t even open a can.”

“Oh, Phil,” I said, “you’re her son, not her father. She has to let you go.”

“No, she doesn’t,” he said, and I could see a blue vein in his temple. I didn’t want to think about whether or not what he said was true, but I could see how hard it would be for him to imagine the rest of his life, and where it would lead him, unless she died. It would be like having a job in a fortune cookie factory, standing all day on an assembly line while optimism passed through your hands on flimsy strips of paper—“You will inherit a million dollars,” “You will go on an exotic vacation”—but never moving, standing in one place while the damp batter of the fortune cookies slid by, all your possible futures settling into that clamminess as it passed.

Once, I looked out my bedroom window and saw Phil in the backyard with his mother, a plastic basket full of laundry between them. She was telling him how to hang it on a line, and the wet sheets looked as heavy and limp as dead women. I could see she was worried that he’d drop the clean laundry on the ground. She was gesturing, tugging on his arm, until finally a pair of her underpants slipped out of his hands, dropped at his feet. Phil just left them there for a while, and then he stepped on them, hard, purposefully, before hanging them on the line—white, over-bleached, too intimate, and dirty.

I hated seeing that laundry hanging in their backyard.

But then it started to rain, and Mrs. Hillman made him take it all down and bring it in again.

Mrs. Hillman is dogged, obstinate, a woman like a log. Perhaps she has to be, being blind. If she didn’t insist on the correctness of her perceptions of every single thing, who would ever believe her perceptions, ever, of anything?

“She drove my father to the edge,” Phil said once, and I pictured Mr. Hillman in the passenger seat next to his blind wife, screaming, hands over his eyes while she drove ninety miles an hour through football fields and forests and backyards strung with laundry flapping on their lines until somehow, miraculously, she slammed on the brakes just before they hit the edge, the place where the world ends, the crater into which Mr. Hillman had flown—through the windshield, smashing through the glass, a sparkling, bloody husband disappearing into the abyss.

For fifteen bright, white years like wet sheets they were married, and had been since high school, when Phil’s father first fell in love with Mrs. Hillman after glimpsing her inside the special ed classroom where she spent her days. An exotic mushroom—something that only grew, all waxy flesh and pale meat, in the light of the moon. He watched her from a distance and must have thought for a long time about what it would be like to kiss a blind girl, to take her clothes off in the dark backseat of his car. Like a goat sneaking up on a milkmaid. Or a bear carrying a virgin into the forest. There was something dirty about it, but everyone would think of you as good for doing what you did, because you loved a girl no one else would want.

But after a decade of that, Mr. Hillman decided his whole life had been a correctable mistake, decided that, since Phil was old enough to take care of Mrs. Hillman, he could leave, become a drifter—a drifter with quite a bit of money, as it happened, as the job he left when he abandoned Phil and his mother was a good one, and he’d been saving money a long time and investing it wisely with drifting in mind.

After that, Phil and his mother left their executive home for Garden Heights, for the expired Mrs. Lefkowsky’s house—a junior executive, which wasn’t squalid, of course, but was not the kind of house they’d moved out of.

Once, early after we’d first started dating, Phil drove me past that house in High Hollow Estates.

“That one,” Phil said, pointing to a huge brick facade. Inside, I could see a black woman moving from room to room. She seemed to be cleaning the air with a rag. “I grew up there,” Phil said, pulling into the driveway, then backing out. “That woman used to be ours.”

A fairy tale with a twisted ending, one in which the sun sets like napalm on the prince and princess as they walk off, sticky all over with fire.

When I come back from the kitchen Mrs. Hillman says, “Look upstairs. Right above us. It sounds like a squirrel burrowing.”

“For Christ’s sake,” Phil says, standing up. “Just sit down, Kat. There’s no squirrels anywhere except in my mother’s head.”

“Phil,” I look at him with my eyes wide, knowing his mother won’t notice, “it can’t hurt to check. It’s probably just my father.”

But it’s not. My father’s asleep on his back on the bed. He’s wearing a sweatshirt that says “U.M.” in big blue letters, like a hesitation on his chest.

LATER PHIL SAYS, “YOU JUST DON’T GET IT. YOU DON’T have to live with her.”

We’re on our way to the Rite Aid in his father’s car to buy the can of air freshener his mother wants. “Glade,” she’d said back at the house after the workmen were gone, “floral.” She handed her pocketbook to Phil and said, “I can smell them in here. Sewage and boots. Take three dollars.”

Phil took an extra ten out of her wallet and slipped it into his.

“I know,” I said, watching the road roll out its rug of slush in front of us. It’s gotten warmer: the usual big January thaw making its annual two-day appearance, duping us into thinking winter’s nearly over when, really, it’s just begun. “But she deserves to be treated with respect, Phil. She can’t help it that she’s blind.”

He glances at me, and the car veers a little closer to the curb. His face is scrunched up, eyes narrowed. I look away, back at the curb, which is painted yellow. A warning.

When I look back, he’s glaring at me. He says, “Do you think I don’t know that?”

Something flutters under my arm then. As if I’ve got a little mouse hidden under it. An artery, pumping. I realize I’m scared. “Forget it,” I whisper into the windshield. “I’m sorry I said anything.”

“Do you think I don’t fucking know that it’s not her fault she’s blind?”

I shake my head. “Of course not,” I say. “I just felt bad for her today.”

“Well.” Phil looks back at the road now, slowing, turning, seeming satisfied. “Well, a person could spend his whole life wandering around looking for things my mother thinks she hears and smells all over the goddamn house. Ten times a day she’s asking me, ‘Do you smell something moldy? Phil, go look in the attic, I think I hear a bat.’” He imitates his mother’s voice—whiny, childlike, but hard-edged, a cross between Betty Boop and my own mother, whose voice, I realize, I’ve nearly forgotten until now, hearing a bit of it in Phil’s impression.

I shrug. “It didn’t hurt me any just to check around the house. I don’t see what difference it makes to you. She was right last night, wasn’t she? About the plumbing?”

“So what?” Phil stops the car in the Rite Aid parking lot, squeezing between two fat mini vans. “So fucking what?” he asks again, slamming the car door, hurrying toward the store.

I unbuckle my seat belt, open the car door, and step into the parking lot, which is glazed with ice that’s been thawing and freezing and thawing now for two months, and I try to hurry after him, but, under me, the parking lot is slick, shifting in panes of gray beneath my boots, and I start to skid. Slipping, I see the fogginess of that slush rush at me, as if I’ve stepped into the path of a nebulous mirror. “Phil,” I call out, and for an instant I glimpse my own surprised face in that mirror as I fall among the swirling clouds and slop—

In that reflection, I’m wearing a veil of slop. The pavement underneath it stings the heel of my hands, and the hot pain brings tears to my eyes.

“Are you all right?” he asks, turning around, finding me behind him on my hands and knees, looking up, seeming to cry. He comes over but doesn’t reach down to touch me, just hovers, casting a wan shadow. I sit, now, resigned, and the slop starts to seep up through my jeans. I feel it spread through my panties, onto my bare skin, and the tears feel hot, the way it feels to pee after swimming in ice-cold water, the way freezing begins as cold and ends as burning.

“HOW ARE THINGS WITH PHIL?” Dr. PHALER ASKS TEN minutes before my hour’s up. By now, we have entirely dispensed with the pretense of psychoanalysis, the pretense that there is something scientific or medical about these hours we spend together. We no longer sift through the details of my childhood and dreams for trouble. That laborious process bore no fruit—just some dull nuggets, like unsalted cashews: a string of images that were not symbols, memories of childhood birthday parties at which no fun was had, insults endured in elementary school rest rooms. Even the subject of my mother has been for the most part exhausted, except on special occasions, like her birthday or my parents’ anniversary. Instead, we spend my sessions mulling over the trivia of the present, its minor annoyances and daily travails.

It is like gossiping once a week with a friend, except that the gossip is about me.

And, for a hundred dollars an hour, Dr. Phaler is a good dispenser of lightweight advice. She never seems distracted. She monitors her facial expressions for just the right display of detachment and compassion, and she always remembers the names of the minor characters in my life—my chemistry teacher, my friends Beth and Mickey, the assistant principal who caught me smoking in the parking lot and gave me a warning.

Dr. Phaler is like the mother you always wished you had. The mother you would have been perfectly happy to pay a hundred dollars an hour to have. Except that you could never afford such a mother. If you had to buy a mother, you’d end up with some old lady who lived with a dozen other kids in a trailer. Or a mother who’d get sick of you and leave, like the one I had.

“Not good,” I say. “I don’t get it.”

“What don’t you get?”

“Well,” I say, and look up at the ceiling of her office, which is tiled with white boards. The boards look porous, false, too light to be a ceiling, as if they’ve been pressed from dust and the buoyant, brittle hair of old ladies, as if they’d fly away if someone sneezed, leaving us roofless, exposed to the sky.

“He says he loves me, but we just don’t have anything together anymore. We don’t talk. We don’t hold hands. When I try to kiss him, he gets rigid,” and I see myself up there on the ceiling, projected onto those white tiles as on a drive-in movie screen, kissing Phil, Phil standing up straighter, backing away, as if I am an overly affectionate dog, one that might turn out to be vicious.

“What does he say when you ask about this?”

“He says he’s got a lot on his mind right now. To cut him some slacks. I think he means slack—”

Dr. Phaler laughs. She is familiar by now with this aspect of Phil’s character, his struggle to express himself in clichйs, never quite getting the clichй right, and it is a joke between us.

“He says kissing just doesn’t do anything for him. He feels numb inside. He complains about his mother a lot, says she’s ruining his life with her whining, that he needs some space.”

“Do you think about ending the relationship?” Dr. Phaler asks, sounding serious, though she is still smiling at our joke.

“For what?” I ask, looking down from the ceiling tile and back at Dr. Phaler.

“Do you mean what for?”

“No.” I shrug. “I mean for what? There aren’t any other boys to date around here—dorks and jocks. I don’t want one of those. And I don’t have a real active social calendar right now. It’s not like Phil’s standing in the way of some glamorous alternative lifestyle I might be leading.”

“So?” Dr. Phaler is playing the fool. “Do you have to stay in a relationship that’s unsatisfactory because no other relationship is available? Wouldn’t you be better off with no boyfriend at all than with one who doesn’t even want to express affection? Kat,” she leans toward me in her chair, looking hard into my eyes, “isn’t that a lot like the relationship you’ve described your parents as having? Haven’t you always said your mother married your father because there was no one else around to marry? Kat,” she continues, glancing at the clock, which is about to run out, “I want you to spend some time this week thinking about your parents’ marriage. Can you do that?”

I don’t bother to answer. Of course, of course. So many connections to be made. So many obvious parallels. Do we really need a Ph.D. for this?

Besides, my time is up.

It occurs to me to tell Dr. Phaler about my fantasies concerning Detective Scieziesciez, how it has crossed my mind that I could make an appointment with him on the pretense that I need to discuss the case of my missing mother, and that this appointment might end with my legs spread on this detective’s desk.

But Dr. Phaler looks satisfied, as if she’s given me a tidy box of explosives to carry with me onto the plane. She stands and opens her door to usher me out, and she smiles sympathetically but says nothing more than “See you next week” as I step out of her office, smile my good-bye politely.

Leaving, I see a young woman, maybe twenty-one, sitting in the waiting room, waiting for Dr. Phaler. This is the third or fourth time I’ve seen her there—as pale and thin as an exhalation. She looks a little shaky, and smells like smoke doused with watery perfume. Bulimic, I imagine: At our high school we have quite a few of those, and I recognize the type. This one looks like a woman perfectly capable of going home and eating four gallons of vanilla ice cream with a big, silver spoon—like eating pleasure itself: creamed, sweetened, frozen, momentary. Then gagging it back into the toilet, washing her face in the sink, rinsing out her mouth, then going straight back into the kitchen for a bag of potato chips—

Those chips would be painful, though.

So many golden sections.

Coming up again, it might feel as though idealism itself had gotten caught in your throat. But it could be satisfying, too. A hard job well done, choking perfection back into the world outside yourself.

Today the bulimic has on too much lipstick, smeared all over her lips as well as above and below them. She glances up from her fashion magazine at me, and her forehead looks cool and damp. And those lips: It looks as if she’s been kissing something painted red while the paint’s still wet, or as if she’s just come back from an emergency room, where she kissed someone bloody.

When she smiles at me, I see the shape of my own smile cut itself into the clamminess of her brow, and I imagine she can see some distorted reflection of herself somewhere on me.

THREE

January 1988

THE GRANDMOTHERS CAME FOR CHRISTMAS, AND ALTHOUGH it’s been a month since they left, I still feel as though I might turn any corner in the house and find one of the grandmothers there—wolf mouth open, arms outstretched, ready to eat me alive.

My mother’s mother, Zeena, and my father’s mother, Marilyn, are crazy about each other. Every morning of their long visit, there they’d be when I came downstairs, sitting on the couch, knees pressed together, hands in a huddle between them, discussing my mother’s disappearance in whispers, marveling at how terribly and well she’s vanished.

Two years. Almost two years.

Grandma Zeena is thin, hard, robust. She looks every inch the woman who, decades ago, left her only child behind in Ohio, moved to the desert, started a bright new life, and didn’t look back. My mother kept a snapshot of Zeena pinned to the mirror over her dresser, and it’s still there. Like everything else, my mother left it when she left us.

In that photograph, Zeena’s standing to the left of a roulette wheel, smiling. The wheel is wild with numbers and lights, rhinestones and gold letters, and Zeena is getting ready to spin it. The expression on her face is wide open, the face of a clock without hands—free of liability, or fear. Whatever happens, this photograph implies, she’ll still be smiling—not smugly, but with true, untroubled joy.

Perhaps Zeena sent this particular snapshot back to her daughter in Ohio as a kind of apology—one that tried to express how we live, really, at the mercy of chance, the accidents of our own impulses, the toss-up of our individual desires. And now that my own mother has left, I think maybe all those hours she spent at the mirror, fussing and unfussing, buttoning and unbuttoning, putting earrings on and taking them off, she kept that photo of Zeena as a model there beside her own reflection, beside the image she was making of herself.

Grandma Zeena managed to go a decade without seeing her daughter. “Time just flew by,” I heard her say one Christmas to my mother. Zeena had flown in for the holiday then, just as she did this year, and the two of them were in the kitchen, peeling potatoes at the sink. I looked at those two women holding blunt roots in their hands, those women I’d issued directly from, and pictured Time as a mechanical sparrow with a little clock radio in its belly, whizzing back and forth between them.

When my mother finally flew at the end of that decade to Las Vegas, at the age of twenty, Zeena met her, according to my mother, with a plastic bag of gifts—a teddy bear, a charm bracelet—as if she were expecting the child she’d left in Ohio to step off that plane, unchanged, ten years later. My mother said she thought Zeena seemed a bit suspicious when she tapped her shoulder and said, “Mom, it’s me.”

“Who?” Zeena asked, the sound of coins slapping slot machines in the airport lobby—tinny, mechanical music.

Later, over margaritas in a casino, sitting at the bar while more machines whirred wildly behind them—nickels, wheels, whistles—Zeena told my mother that she’d never loved my mother’s father, that it was why she left. My grandmother’s eyes were aquamarine in the salt light of her margarita, the color of a couple of rhinestones dropped out of a showgirl’s tiara into dust.

She continued, “I was pregnant, you know. Kicked out of the house. Too young to know what else to do.” As she spoke, Zeena chewed a ragged fingernail, painted red—and, replaying the moment in her mind for many years, my mother would think of that hangnail as a bloody claw caught in her mother’s mouth. An owl’s claw, or a fishhook: Her mother had stuck it in her mouth herself, but she seemed snagged by it, helpless, there in Las Vegas.

“How is your father?” she asked, and before my mother could answer, Zeena added, “Now there’s a man who knows nothing about women.”

My mother never had a chance to answer because they had to hurry. Zeena’s new boyfriend, Roger, was picking them up outside the Lady Luck in his new convertible. They were going to show her the sights. “Bottoms up,” Zeena said, tipping her glass toward my mother’s, “time to fly.”

That last sip of margarita might have tasted like a man’s sweat in my mother’s mouth, and she felt nauseated, spongy. The Friday before, she’d graduated from college, and that afternoon she’d flown across the country. Zeena had sent her the ticket slipped into a card that said “CONGRATULATIONS” inside, but on the outside was a drawing of a couple kissing, not a diploma or a graduation cap, and when her father dropped her off at the airport he said, “Now don’t give her any money. She said this was a gift.”

It was the first plane ride of my mother’s life, and looking down on the country slipping under her like something spilled had made her sick. And as soon as she and Zeena stepped together out of the air-conditioned airport, the heat hit her with the weight of a burning wall, and Zeena said, “You know, I’ll have to borrow some money to pay a cab to get us back to the apartment. I spent every last dime on that plane ticket, Eve.” My mother fished around in her purse, and handed her mother twenty dollars. It was one hundred degrees out there in the blank heat of the desert under a flat, colorless sky. As they waited for a cab on the sidewalk, my mother couldn’t stand on both feet for very long, the concrete boiling under the flimsy soles of her sandals. She had to keep switching feet as each one got too hot, and she felt like a bird in her white sundress—a big white chicken stranded in the desert, dancing on sand.

My mother told this story right in front of Zeena at Christmas dinner that year, and as she told it, Zeena laughed. She wore that same unapologetic expression she wore in the snapshot with the roulette wheel.

Even now, Zeena’s hair is blonde. She wears pencil-shaped skirts and thin knit sweaters, push-up bras. Her body is oddly solid, muscled—not like a young woman’s, but like a statue’s—though her face looks every year of her sixty-seven, half of them lived beneath a merciless Nevada sun, washing the sky with toxic light.

But her teeth are narrow and sharp. They are the teeth of a woman who could chew up carpet tacks and spit them out all over the house. It’s no wonder, I think, looking at her, that my mother was the kind of mother she was.

“Kat,” she asked me on Christmas Eve, sitting on the edge of my bed, leaning into me, “do you know where your mother is?”

“Grandma,” I said, sincerely shocked and sounding it, “do you think if I knew I wouldn’t tell you?”

Zeena swallowed that, and it looked like a spoonful of splinters going down.

“I guess you would,” Zeena said. Then she thought. “But your mother was a secretive girl. I suppose you could be, too. You know,” she looked down at her fingernails, which were long and painted mother-of-pearl, “that Detective What’s-his-shh called me again a few weeks ago to ask if I’d heard from Eve.”

“And?” I asked.

“And I told him, I said, ‘Pal, you might as well just close the case on this one. Hell will freeze over before that woman comes back. She’s my daughter, and she’s got running in her blood.’”

I swallowed.

I thought of Detective Scieziesciez’s back, his trench coat. Sometimes at night I’d still think of him. His rough face pressed between my legs. I’d imagine him pulling up in his dark car, as he did that one day, busting through the front door of our suburban home with his gun drawn, sweeping me up in his arms, throwing the frilly bedspread to the floor in one clean sweep. “Everything here looks perfectly normal,” he’d say, as he’d said then, but this time he’d be yanking my panties down to my knees as he said it.

I was hoping I’d get to see Detective Scieziesciez again at least once before he closed my mother’s case, and I hoped my grandmother hadn’t said anything to make the chances of that any slimmer than they already seemed.

Marilyn appeared in the doorway then, a red dressing gown loose and frilled around her ample hips and the big, generous, water balloons of her breasts, blocking the light from the hall. Unlike Zeena, Marilyn is soft—a garden of petunias after a long, hard, humid rain. Her hair is red. (“Not just dyed,” my father would say, “that hair is dead.”) She has been a widow longer than she was married, and loves everyone to distraction. Over and over she’ll say, “I love you,” or “I loved him,” eyes tearing up, “I just loved the hell out of your grandpa Sam”—who’d died one day of a stroke while Marilyn was frying pork cutlets, just dropped over on the kitchen floor as though someone had snuck up behind him and pulled a drawstring too tight around his neck—or, “I loved the stuffings out of every one of my sons.” By the time she’s done, you are embarrassed about how few and little you’ve loved, how stingy you’ve been with your affections.

“You’re so much like your mother,” Marilyn said. “It’s uncanny. The resemblance. It gives me the chills. I just loved your mother.”

She shuddered, to show us.

Outside, there was the sound of humming—power lines, or jets, or Santas cruising over us in their electric sleds.

THE PHONE RINGS IN THE MORNING AS I’M GETTING READY for school, pulling black tights up to my waist, doing a little dance in the bathroom to get them on.

Before I lost weight, I’d wear whatever was clean in my closet, whatever I could squeeze into, whatever I imagined my mother would not complain too much about when I emerged from my bedroom into her line of vision (“Jesus, Kat, you’re not going to wear that?”).

But since I’ve been thin, dressing myself in the morning has gotten harder. The night before, I lie in bed and imagine myself in various combinations of skirt and sweater, and then in the various poses I might be seen in wearing them—leaning over the drinking fountain in the hall at school, slurping that water the temperature of body fluids, a tepid stream of something human and nauseating in my mouth. Or sitting behind my desk in Great Books, legs crossed at the ankles while Mr. Norman drones on and on about Paradise Lost.

Mr. Norman wears horn-rimmed glasses and weighs only about a hundred pounds, but his lectures make Satan seem sexy and slick, like someone Mr. Norman himself might secretly admire.

Listening, I imagine Satan and Detective Scieziesciez waiting for me in a silver Thunderbird in the high school parking lot, smoking cigarettes, waiting to see what I’m wearing that afternoon.

God knows there’s no one else at my high school to dress up for, no one who matters, no one who would look at me twice even if I walked down that gray corridor stark naked. Phil wouldn’t notice, and my closest friends, Mickey and Beth, aren’t exactly fashion plates themselves. At Theophilus Reese High, by twelfth grade, you are whoever you’ve been until then. Your lot’s cast early. Your lot. Your caste.

And, back when it mattered, back when the beautiful kids had been sorted from the homely, I’d been fat. Now, no matter what I weigh, until graduation day, I will be Fat.

But lately I’ve noticed men—some of them older than my father—watching me walk in and out of restaurants, watching me walk from my mother’s station wagon, which is mine now, into McDonald’s, or the library, or the mall. “Is this yours?” a man in an expensive black suit asked me one afternoon last week as I stood in line at the drugstore with a package of tampons. He was out of breath and holding a limp red mitten in his hand. I shook my head, looking at it. That bloody hand, extended.

“Oh,” he seemed disappointed, and then chagrined. “Well, then, would you like me to buy you a sandwich somewhere?”

It was pathetic, and we both laughed. I handed the cashier my tampons, and even she looked shy. “I can’t,” I said.

He looked at me for a few seconds before he said, “You’re an awfully attractive woman,” and then he left, winking over his shoulder as the automatic doors jolted open nervously for him, and the cashier stuffed my package into a plastic sack. “Some men . . .” she said, but she wouldn’t look me in the eyes.

He’d only been gone a moment before I’d forgotten what he looked like, or why I hadn’t wanted the sandwich he wanted to buy.

Being noticed is new, and every day I have to prove to myself it can be done again to believe it ever has. In my imagination every night, I pan around the room I will be in the next day like a little Tinkerbell, viewing myself from every angle, appraising myself from the front, the back, above, below—a whirring electric eye.